FWC Cambridge’ Yevheniia Mikheenko
As I wrote in the Crete blog, neuroscientist Yevheniia Mikheenko (FWC Cambridge) has been successful in obtaining funding from the Medical Research Council to start a research project to investigate psychophysiological biomarkers with the aim of “Characterising adaptive emotion regulation in resilience”
This translates into research on how Olympic and elite athletes maintain their psychological health (especially after a setback such as a major injury) whilst going through their punishing training and competition schedules. Yevheniia’s application for funding was one of many, and she had to meet the Panel’s criteria for applicants who had shown “clear evidence of achievement in terms of publications or conference presentations, and whose proposals seemed most likely to promote independence and deliver personal benefit beyond the broader interests of the host laboratory”.
FWC Cambridge’ Yevheniia Mikheenko
Yevheniia has trained with FWC Kung Fu for 3 years, whilst completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge. She trains in both hard style and soft style, and has been on some of the training trips to China and Egypt. Whilst training her interest in how the brain responds to emotional trauma has branched out into how sports people cope with pressure and how that can be measured scientifically. Interest in sports psychology has only increased with the Olympics just behind us and the regular stories from British athletes of how the home crowd urged them on and gave them (even more) will to win. Kung Fu has a long tradition of helping people recover from illness and injury and even in making adaptations for disability. Yevheniia has herself used her training to help recover from major illness.
We look forward to hearing how the experiments go, and offer congratulations on this great achievement.