sports

Divide and Conquer

Jason Mihalik and Johna Register-Mihalik — both exercise and sport science professors — have spent the past 17 years beautifully navigating the personal-professional divide at UNC-Chapel Hill. Not only did they meet and get married at Carolina, but they’ve since gained tenure and now oversee innovative and complementary research programs within the field of sports-related concussion.

Running Interference

Nearly 4 million sports- and recreation-related concussions happen each year. About 300,000 of those occur in football. For a long time, such data didn’t exist because these injuries weren’t understood or taken seriously. Decades before he became UNC’s chancellor, neuroscientist Kevin Guskiewicz strived to create the playbook for preventing and treating concussions — and changed the game forever.

Destinee Grove

Senior Destinee Grove is an undergraduate researcher in the UNC College of Arts & Sciences, majoring in exercise and sport science and psychology. Her research focuses on a collection of concussion measures like cognitive function, eye movement, and posture ability for athletes. She is a Morehead-Cain Scholar and also a research assistant at the Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center.

Lift More, Eat More, Burn More

Research from exercise and sport science professor Abbie Smith-Ryan shows that lifting heavier weights and eating more protein is not just for men.