Nathaniel Thom
- Assistant Professor -
- Wheaton College -
Collaborations: two heads are better than one.
I'm very interested in how to prevent stress-related disease and especially in how physical and mental training programs provide this type of protection so most of my collaborations are in that vein. However, my love of statistics allows me to collaborate with a variety of people on meta-regression analyses. I also do my best to let my students stretch me into new areas of research.
Effect of Exercise on Fatigue
It is counter-intuitive that people report feeling more energetic and less fatigued after exercise. Along with Dr. Derek Monroe, a post-doc at the University of California-Irvine, We are seeking to explore the underlying neurobiological mechanism for this conundrum. Using fNIRS, we measured changes to brain flood after an acute bout of moderate intensity exercise during a fatiguing cognitive task.
We are also in the midst of performing a meta-analysis on the effects of chronic exercise on feelings of energy and fatigue with Dr. Matt Herring, Lecturer at the University of Limerick.
Aid worker risk and resilience
Along with Dr. Pam Davis, Director of Counseling at Gordon-Conwell Charlotte, and Luke Tseng, a doctoral student in the Psychology Department at Wheaton College, we are exploring the factors that promote risk and resilience among cross-cultural aid workers. Our ultimate goal is to develop a large longitudinal database that can serve as a resource for surveilling behavioral health among aid workers.
Previous collaborations
Exercise is therapeutic for people with MS in a number of ways. In this collaboration we're exploring the addition of vibration-therapy to exercise therapy to see if the two enhance each other. I'm working with LeeAnn Steinfeldt, D.C. at the Neurobalance Center and Rob Motl, Ph.D., a Professor in the Department of Physical Therapy at The University of Alabama-Birmingham, as well as students from Wheaton College, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and Indiana University, on this collaboration.
Effect of Exercise on Multiple Sclerosis
In what way does glucose consumption affect how your blood vessels function? This is one of the central questions for Dr. Hunt's lab. He and I, in collaboration with Matt Herring, Ph.D., a Lecturer at the University of Limerick, as well as several Applied Health Science students at Wheaton College, published a meta-analysis in an effort to answer this question.
Glucose and vascular function
