Jefferson Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute is pleased to announce that Rachel Marbaker, PhD, has begun her new role as a postdoctoral fellow in our Institute’s Sensorimotor Learning Laboratory, Directed by Amanda S. Therrien, PhD.
Dr. Marbaker completed a joint BS/BA degree in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics at Lafayette College. While there, she had the opportunity to engage in multiple research projects. Through a summer research program at the University of Delaware, Dr. Marbaker worked in the Department of Biomedical Engineering under the supervision of Fabrizio Sergi, PhD. She collaborated with graduate students to prepare a protocol for split-belt treadmill studies in the lab and gained experience recruiting participants, collecting data, and performing data analysis for a project examining whether split-belt treadmill training induced changes in gait kinematics and dynamics.
During her junior and senior years at Lafayette College, Dr. Marbaker joined the lab of Brent Utter, PhD. There, she played an instrumental role in the development of an inexpensive, modifiable device for characterizing a variety of actuators and materials. She helped design, construct, and program the device; design the user interface; and validate and improve device measurements. In addition, Dr. Marbaker collaborated with colleagues at the University of Minnesota on an honors thesis project focused on exploring the behavior and properties of knitted architectures of shape memory alloy wire. This material can be deformed at cold temperatures but returns to its pre-deformed shape when heated.
Her interests in applying engineering principles and approaches to clinically relevant research questions led Dr. Marbaker to pursue a PhD in the Neuromechanics Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder with Alaa Ahmed, PhD. For her dissertation, Dr. Marbaker developed and conducted novel research on the interaction between movement effort and motor learning. Through this work, she further honed her skills in literature review, experimental design, data collection, data analysis, and mentoring junior researchers. Dr. Marbaker successfully defended her dissertation in May of 2025.
In her role at the Institute, Dr. Marbaker will be working closely with Dr. Therrien on an NSF-funded project examining the processes our brains use to estimate where the body is in space and how sensory predictions and perceptions may influence human movement. She is also interested in exploring the sensory underpinings for the brain’s sense of effort in movement. The Institute is excited to welcome Dr. Marbaker to the team, and we look forward to working with her!