Mark: Welcome to NARIC's Spotlight Podcast. I'm Mark Odum, NARIC's director. In today's episode, we have Dr. Sasha Portnova, a NIDILRR-funded fellow, and Jess Chaiken, NARIC's media and information services manager. They will discuss Dr. Portnova's work as a NIDILRR-funded fellow and what it was like, what prompted the development of Dr. Portnova's Gears in Progress podcast, and what's next in her research and podcast, among other topics. Please join me in listening to this enlightening conversation.
Jess and Sasha, would you like to introduce yourselves, please?
Jess: Sasha, why don’t you go first.
Sasha: My name is Sasha and I just recently finished an awesome NIDILRR funded fellowship at the University of Washington, where I focused on supporting individuals with upper body disabilities in making hand tracking technology more inclusive and potentially enhance hand therapy for them as well. And right now, I am a research scientist engineer at the University of Washington working under Dr. Kat Steele. And I'm also the host and producer of Gears of Progress podcast that we'll hopefully be covering a bit today on the episode.
Jess: So, you mentioned that you are the fellow at the University of Washington Advanced Rehabilitation Research and Training Center in their postdoctoral program. What was it like to be a postdoc there?
Sasha: It was such an incredible experience of being a postdoc. I think it's such a nice breath of fresh air after, you know, being working on something for six years as a PhD and you feel like there's no end to it. And there's so many things that you need to do on top of your research where it was, it kind of gives you this good preparatory experience for a faculty career. You design your project from scratch. You see it come through every step of the process. I did my undergrad at the University of Washington, so it was also a nice to be back in a lot of ways to see the old faces, the familiar faces, to see the new faces, to see how much the university has grown into what it is now, especially, you know, so the Knightler fellowship that I was part was through the CREATE Center at the University of Washington. And the development of it as I left as an undergrad, it was just kind of beginning to develop, it was in the process, but now it's a big center.
Jess: Okay.
Mark: Hmm.
Sasha: It was just wonderful working, part of it and working with all the incredible people that are, whose goal is to improve the lives of individuals with nice being part of this community.
Jess: Yeah, So I know that the ARRT program is kind of, it's designed to build up and coming investigators and give them the tools that they're going to need to, on their path being a principal investigator. Could you talk about some of them, like the foundational tools that you picked skills that you acquired as part of that program?
Sasha: The ARRT program that I was part of, goal of it was basically, as you mentioned, is to train leaders in rehabilitation research. And the idea was to harness advances in physical computing and fabrication to enhance living and participation with people with disabilities. So, the training program was basically a two-year where it included everything from research, coursework, mentoring in physical computing tools for applications. So ended up taking courses again, but now instead of, know, as a PhD student, there's a big load of courses that you need to take. This one was very focused on what courses you need in order to enhance your work and I finally got to mentor students…
Mark: (Laughs).
Sasha: …PhD students in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine. We just kind of worked because it was a collaborative project across multiple disciplines. So, I got to do that. And most importantly, doing research, a lot of research, was probably my favorite part.
Jess: So, that's great. You had the opportunity to be both a mentee and a mentor.
Sasha: Yes, yes. So, in a way, being a mentor is a very, is an essential part of being a principal investigator when we're talking about academic careers. So, this is a great opportunity because I didn't have a lot of mentoring experience during my PhD. Part of it was during the COVID. Another part of it…
Mark: Hmm.
Sasha: …I had a little kid, so I didn't just have a lot of that opportunity during PhD, but I got plenty of that during my postdoctoral I feel more prepared to tackle on the role of a faculty.
Mark: Mm-hmm.
Jess: Yeah. As part of your fellowship, you developed this Gears of Progress podcast. What inspired you to get started on the podcasting path and to choose that topic?
Sasha: I've actually been wanting to start a podcast for this point, I don't know, five years. Until… ever since I had a kid, got into podcasts because it felt like it was the most productive thing or listening to podcasts, right? The most productive thing you can do while walking, while your hands are busy. You feel like you're learning something and I...
Mark: Yeah.
Sasha: I always really liked to talk about science. If you haven't noticed yet, I'm a big fan of the lab environments that I've been part of, there's always been a lot of very engaging conversations about everyone's work, the science, the next steps of the projects that everyone was working on. So, I really liked this idea. But then later I also realized that there is a big…
Mark: Mm-hmm.
Sasha: …gap that is missing in the scientific community and it's this importance of scientific communication. I think we focus a lot on typing up those manuscripts, submitting them to big journals and then just hoping for those big citations, but no one thinks about communicating that to the general public. And I think that's a big pitfall when it comes to research that's done…
Jess: Mm-hmm.
Sasha: …assist and to improve the lives of individuals with disability, just because I think that the translational piece is missing and you're not going to have end users go in or even, you know, most of the time, even like the rehab professionals, the clinicians, they're not going to go into your engineering journal and read about whatever you developed. And if your technology or development is not leaving the walls of your research lab, then…
Jess: Right.
Sasha: …it's not benefiting anyone. So, I think there's a lot of things that prompted me to start gears of progress, but I think it's most important overarching goal that it's trying to kind of achieve is this importance of science communication and role it plays in the public acceptance of the technology that comes out of the lab.
Jess: Over at the Center on Knowledge Translation for Disability and Rehabilitation Research, is a NIDILRR-funded knowledge translation center, in their annual KT conference, a few times it's come up with how can we communicate science beyond the journal article? What are the tools that we can use?
And a few times podcasting has come up, podcasting or videos, YouTube videos. I think at one point we also talked about the six-minute thesis and the three-minute thesis. You know, how can you explain your project in one slide and three minutes, that kind of thing. So, I love hearing about the other ways that we can communicate about science, get it out of the journal. Not that journal articles aren't important. They're super important. How do we get it into the hands of the people?
Mark: Sasha, real quickly, how did you come up with the name Gears of Progress?
Sasha: It took me a while. I was asking Chat GPT for a couple of weeks. It wasn't producing anything that right. I brainstormed among my lab members, and someone mentioned wheels of progress. And I think it's...
Jess: Mm.
Sasha: It's an organization that provides wheelchairs if I'm correct. And just being an engineer and this in a way being an engineer heavy podcast, felt like Gears would be appropriate. And Gears is something that's, you know, it's in every mechanism. And I think of the research and innovation that comes up and the fields of rehabilitation engineering and assistive technology are all about making progress. So, it's this mechanism of making progress in our daily lives.
Jess: Yeah, it works perfectly. Can you tell us about some of the cool guests you've interviewed?
Mark: Hmm.
Sasha: Too many. I thought of it and too many. I think the very first one that comes to mind for sure is Spero Koulouras. This is episode nine for anyone interested. He's an entrepreneur who has ALS himself and he's basically developed this simple yet very effective solution that is an alternative to overpriced gaze trackers that are very actively used by people with ALS or muscle dystrophy, spinal cord injury. But yeah, the current solutions are just overpriced and are not as robust for daily use. So, the thing he developed is a very simple but amazing and cost-effective solution. And we basically, the episode goes over path of how he developed that. Another one I really liked was the interview with Rita Stanley from RESNA, the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America. And this is special episode number two. It was on policy making and basically how researchers can think…
Jess: Mm-hmm.
Sasha: …ahead of time as they're planning their project on how reach policymakers to ensure that whatever comes out of their lab, the assistive technology is accessible because most of the time, even if it makes it to the market, you know, there's this whole, there's so many barriers in terms of getting it reimbursed, being able to prescribe it and I think it's a very important episode for all the researchers to listen through just to understand the ways and pathways of policymaking and how research influences that. and I think another one that I also like to give a shout out to is episode four was Fatma Inanici from the University of Washington. It's basically on the effects of noninvasive spinal stimulation in treating paralysis. This episode was specifically to restoring hand function in individuals with spinal cord injury. But for me, this episode is very important because oftentimes when we talk about assistive technology, rehab engineering, things are very...
Jess: Mm-hmm.
Sasha: I think there's a heavy engineering side and very little true clinical research, this one was a very kind of true clinical research with very intensive study protocols over years of exploring the feasibility of this technology. There are some really cool results in, I think. There's a lot of studies that are popping up here and there on the effects of spinal stimulation in different populations, but an upcoming episode is going to be a special episode. So, it's not truly a guest. This is about Cybathlon, which is basically this competition event that takes place every four years at the university called ETH Zurich in Switzerland, where a bunch of labs and industry professionals get together and they compete in eight different disciplines. They have pilots who are participants with disabilities that use the technology that they develop. It can be a brain computer interface, BCI, hand prosthesis, and leg prosthesis. And then they have to overcome this challenge, like a set of obstacles basically. They compete in that way. So, this is going to be an episode on CYBATHLON that is actually going to be taking place October 25th to 27th, I think, and everyone can stream it online. Yes.
Jess: How cool. Damn. Do you have any, like a dream get, a guest or a topic when you hit your fifth anniversary, your 10th anniversary of doing this, you want?
Sasha: Yeah, A dream guest is already coming up. I have him scheduled and I'm actually interviewing him tomorrow. It's Dr. Rory Cooper. I'm pretty sure everyone knows Dr. Cooper, a big name in the space of rehabilitation engineering Paralympics and...
Jess: Cool.
Mark: Yeah.
Sasha: …enhancing wheelchair designs, so many patents. So definitely that's a big one. I think another one that I haven't, I guess I'm a bit hesitant, bit scared of contacting him, but a personal favorite of mine is Bobra Dossi. This is the inventor of TRS…
Jess: Yeah.
Sasha: …prosthetic hooks. is an amputee himself who developed this solution to kind of the regular prosthetic hooks that are like usually the split hook that everyone uses. But he developed kind of his variation of that and has been very successful of that. And he's actually even won the 2016 CYBATHLON challenge, the upper prosthetics challenge. And I think the person, the...
Jess: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Cool.
Mark: Yeah.
Sasha: The reason for my admiration was his work is as an engineer, think we get carried away with designing super complex, wild solutions to whatever problem we're given, but his designs are so simple and they're purely mechanic, they're fully body driven, there's no electronics in it, but the...
Jess: Mm-hmm.
Sasha: These types of devices actually in upper limb prosthetics are the ones that are most widely used. It’s just kind of to rim, I guess it's a good humbling experience for engineers and who get carried away with wild research to keep it simple and really try to address the problem at hand rather than designing something overly cool that you think is cool.
Jess: All right.
Sasha: So yes, Bobra Dossi, if you hear this, I am wanting to send you an email but have been very shy about that.
Jess: Well, maybe the special episode about the CYBATHLON will give you like an entree to say I'd love to follow up with you on this. Yeah. So, you're an up-and-coming researcher and an investigator. How would you encourage young scholars or newer rehab professionals to get involved in research and development?
Sasha: Yes. I think my motto throughout life has been asking you shall be given. I know it's a very simple, sometimes silly motto, but I've learned through years of being an academic researcher that that is usually the way to get you to the places you want to go. Just be open about what you want to do and that's how I got started on this research. I went up to a professor at the University of Washington who was doing, who was just kind of his research was about applying engineering principles to medical problems. It was just the beginning of that. This was like 2014. There was no biomechanics…
Mark: Wow.
Sasha: …in our department, no one really understood what that was, no one thought of applying mechanical engineering to a human body was a thing. And I went up to him and I was like, hey, I really love the idea, but I really don't like doing it on a micro scale. Like, do you know of anyone who does it on a scale that I can actually observe with my human eye? And he directly pointed me to Kat Steele, who was also my undergrad advisor and... who was a new faculty at that time. And it's like, hey, you might want to reach out, which is what I did. And I think throughout my academic life, that's what I've been doing. Often, I mean, you are going to be hitting closed doors, or people are going to say no, or they're not interested. But I think the more you ask, the more chances there are that you are going to be going in the direction you want to.
And I think a simpler way, just kind of a, not very metaphorical, but the most straightforward way is to look for research labs in your department, your university, if you're a young scholar, if you're rehab professional, if you're a clinician, maybe your clinic, or a local clinic might have something, some research going on. Like for example, UW, University of Washington does a lot of research with local clinics like the Seattle Children's Hospital, Hanger Clinic that does prosthetics research. Yeah, I don't know if that's an answer that people expect, but sometimes, again, I think it comes back to this. The solution might not be as complex as we think it is. Maybe it's as simple as asking.
Jess: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, maybe sometimes it is. So, what's next for you in your research?
Sasha: I am still at the University of Washington. Like I said, I just kind of changed the hat that I'm wearing. I'm no longer a doctoral fellow, which saddens me because I really liked the experience. But I'm now a research scientist engineer with Dr. Kat Steele. I kind of switched gears. I have up until now, I have been doing primarily upper extremity work. So, I am always interested in the human hand and sometimes I get introduced as the hand expert, which I get very shy about, but I also like it because in, I think when we talk about rehabilitation engineering or assistive technology, there's very little work in the hand realm. There's a lot of work in the leg realm. So, I like that, but now I'm kind of switching gears and going lower in the body, learning a lot of learning. It's a great, very steep learning curves. But with a podcast, there's no plan on stopping on that. I am still doing it. As you can tell, I have guests lined up, guests I want to interview that I haven't emailed yet. ultimately my goal is…
Jess: Good. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Sasha: …Faculty like tenure track career, which is I'm on the market for it right now and I think I would like to produce the podcast even as a faculty member as well and maybe get students involved in that just because I think there's a lot of value in interviewing other people about the work they do about, you know, finding ways to find the right, to ask the right questions. Find the times when you think, you know, this might not be the most accessible way that the person described their research and just kind of like, hey, stopping them there and being like, hey, can you elaborate more on this? Maybe have them be guest speakers because that's basically how I started Gears of Progress.
Most of my first guest speakers were people that I already knew, so that it wasn't as scary to start. But yeah, there's still a lot of amazing research that is at the forefront of these fields, and it's so diverse and so widespread that I don't think I'll ever run out of topics. Just, you know, like...
Jess: Mm-hmm. Sure. Right. It's a wonderful problem to have.
Sasha: Absolutely. Like I interview people that from the field, I mean, still fields of, you know, assistive technology fields, but it can be on assistive technology for communication or for like navigation. There's a wonderful episode with Thule on its …I'm blanking on the name. But basically, the idea of the project that they did was understanding the accessibility of roads and sidewalks. Project Sidewalk is the name coming from the University of Washington. Then they have these wonderful mapathons where they have community members just sitting on Google Maps and looking through every single curb and…
Jess: Yeah, okay. Mm-hmm. Right.
Sasha: …sidewalk and just rating the accessibility features and it's amazing. And this is something that I would never know about just being locked in my own side of the field, you know, but it's still part of our field. So, I'm excited to learn more.
Jess: Yeah. Excellent. Well, this has been really wonderful talking with you about both your experience as a postdoc and the inspiration behind Gears of Progress. those, you're right. I love podcasts for just something to listen to while I'm out and about or cooking or something like that. And I can't wait to listen to those, the shout-out episodes that you mentioned and especially the upcoming CYBATHLON episodes. Fabulous. So really looking forward to that.
Any last words of wisdom for our audience before we go? But if they come across a postdoc program, what would you say if someone came to you and said, you know, I heard that UW has an ARRT program. Should I go for it?
Sasha: Absolutely. If that's what you want to do. Absolutely. I love the experience. Like I said, I think it provided me with incredible tools to be a better, not just researcher, I think, you know, with years of research, you become good at it, especially if you stay in your own field, you hone those skills, but it really widens the… It provides you with, with much more than just those, those research tools that, know, are the mentoring skills that are extremely important. Being, being a leader in research and innovation, designing solutions for people with disabilities. Just, yeah, through and through it was a wonderful experience. 10 out of 10. I'd do it again.
Mark: Yeah.
Jess: Excellent.
Mark: Thank you for listening to today's episode of NARIC’s Spotlight Podcast. This is Mark Odom. I'd like to thank Sasha and Jess for joining us in such a lively discussion. I look forward to seeing the results of Sasha's work and listening to the future episodes of her Gears in Progress podcast. Links to Gears in Progress podcast and to the resources mentioned in this episode may be found in the episode's description. To learn more about Sasha's work or other NIDILRR-funded research, please contact NARIC’s information specialist. Once again, thanks for listening.
Sasha: Thank you.