Zachary Graham Pensacola Evening lecture

THE TALK: Walk This Way or How I Learned to Start Worrying About Walking

Walking on two legs is a defining characteristic of human beings and society, in general, has largely assumed that its members can walk. The millions of years of our evolution as a species was springboarded by the transition from four legs to two, raising our sightlines, making travel more metabolically efficient, and freeing our hands. Our world, despite all of our advances in technology, engineering, and computing, still relies on our ability to walk. Whether it is going through the grocery store, walking your dog, or exploring a mountain, walking is integral to healthspan, quality of life, and independent living. This lecture will cover the importance of maintaining our ability to walk and highlight some ways to improve our walking performance. The lecture also will explore how losing this ability, either suddenly (e.g., traumatic spinal cord injury) or gradually (e.g., normal aging), results in loss of community membership and predicts morbidity and mortality.

Zachary Graham is a Research Scientist at IHMC. His research spans both preclinical and clinical domains with a primary goal of improving metabolic and contractile function of skeletal muscle in aging, spinal cord injury, and Parkinson’s disease. A major goal across all Zachary’s lines of research has been trying to improve walking performance from the mouse to the human. He is currently co-leading a National Institute on Aging multi-site clinical study to further our understanding of the principal mechanisms that lead to walking dysfunction in aging.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish from The Ohio State University in 2007 and a Master’s and Ph.D., from the University of Kansas in 2010 and 2014. respectively. He completed postdoctoral training in muscle physiology from 2014-2018 at the National Center for the Medical Consequences of Spinal Cord Injury at the James J. Peters Veterans Administration Medical Center in the Bronx, NY. He currently has additional affiliations at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, the Birmingham VA Medical Center and the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx, NY.