This workshop will examine the grounding of disease, illness and injury in a common theoretical framework of nonlinear dynamics. The concept of dynamical disease will provide a springboard to exploring rhythms of health, and how analysis and modeling tools can be used to identify signatures of specific pathologies and the prediction of critical failure in underlying sub-systems. General topics will include coordination of system components and the role of both stability and flexibility in adaptive and maladaptive systems, with an eye toward new frontiers for understanding resilience in physical health.

Bio: Dr. Adam Kiefer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. He is also adjunct faculty in the Division of Sports Medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and an affiliate of the Center for Cognition, Action & Perception in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. He obtained his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at the University of Cincinnati and served as a post-doctoral research associate in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. Dr. Kiefer also serves as the secretary of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences. Dr. Kiefer's research takes a complex systems approach to performance enhancement and injury prevention in sport and pioneers innovative technologies such as augmented and virtual reality and eye tracking within a novel precision medicine framework to improve training and clinical outcomes. His expertise in behavioral dynamics and dynamical disease provides an innovative approach to measuring, modeling and analyzing the complexity of healthy and pathological human performance in a variety of contexts. Dr. Kiefer has received over $6 million in research funding and his work has resulted in multiple research awards from the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Sports Medicine and, most recently, he was the recipient of the University of Cincinnati chapter 2019 Sigma Xi Young Investigator award. Dr. Kiefer has published in journals, including: the British Journal of Sports Medicine; the American Journal of Sports Medicine; Sport, Exercise and Performance Psychology; Experimental Brain Research; Frontiers in Psychology; the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. He has also received two separate awards for best paper in both Sports Health and Pediatric Physical Therapy.