Student Spotlight: Emily Isenstein

Emily Isenstein, a student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at URMC, is the 2019 recipient of the Child Neurology Foundation Neurodevelopmental Disabilities (NDD) Summer Research Scholarship. This scholarship is given to medical students interested in training as child neurologists, and Emily plans to use this project as the foundation for her Ph.D. research. With support from the NDD scholarship, Emily is conducting research on visual-proprioceptive integration in autism using a combination of perceptual, behavioral, and virtual reality experiments. Emily has worked with individuals with neurodevelopmental disabilities for more than ten years and has long been fascinated by the role that proprioceptive awareness plays in autism etiology and presentation. She hopes that by further understanding variability in proprioceptive functioning, the field will move closer toward developing personalized therapeutics and care for populations with neurodevelopment disabilities.