Dr. Purser holds a primary appointment in the Division of Geriatrics, Department of Medicine and is a Senior Fellow in the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development. She is an NIH NCMRR/NICHD K01 Mentored Research Scientist Career Development Awardee, and an NIA Claude D. Pepper National Junior Faculty Scholar. Her research programs focus on geriatric functional assessment, and on the genetic and environmental factors associated with muscle sarcopenia and physical frailty in aging. In collaboration with Duke’s Center for Human Genetics, Dr. Purser is conducting genotyping in an elderly cohort of 2500 older adults, and is identifying DNA mutations associated with muscle impairment, function, and survival over a 10-year period. Dr. Purser has served on NIH’s Neurological and Musculoskeletal Epidemiology (NAME) study section, and currently serves on the Gerontological Society of America’s Health Sciences Section Executive Committee and Task Force on Women. She chairs the Physical Therapy Research Seminar Series Committee, serves on the Internal Operating Committee of  Duke’s Claude D. Pepper Center , and in the coming year will be conducting research on patterns of disability and unmet need in China ’s large and rapidly expanding aging population.

 

 

 

Dr. Pastva bridges her experiences in physical therapy, phyisology, and immunology to develop interventions for environmentally-induced lung diseases. Dr. Pastva’s experiments have raised the intriguing question of whether a sedentary lifestyle is a predisposing factor for the development of allergic lung disease. She also explores whether deficiencies in or inactivation of pulmonary surfactant-associated proteins promotes allergic lung disease. Dr. Pastva has presented her research findings at international conferences for the American Physical Therapy Association, American Thoracic Society, the American Physiological Society, and the International Surfactant Conference. She is a manuscript reviewer for the Journal of Immunology, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, and Clinical and Experimental Allergy. Dr. Pastva is the recipient of a 2008 National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease’s K08 Mentored Clinical Scientist Research Career Development Award. She is also a Duke Pepper Older Americans Independence Center (OAIC) Research Career Development Awardee in Aging Research. She serves on the Membership Committee of the American Thoracic Society, is an advisor in Duke’s Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Physical Therapy Residency Program, and is a member on the DPT Division’s Research Committee

           

 

                       

Dr. Goode is collaborating with Dr. Cook to validate the NHANES ADL scale in a population of patients with cervical or low back pain. With Dr. Timothy Carey, the Director of The Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC, he is developing a project to describe health disparities in Health Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) and barriers to accessing care for low back pain (LBP).