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Dr. Liz Warren is a postdoctoral fellow in the Bioastronautics and Fundamental Space Biology Postdoctoral Research Program. She received her B.S. in Physiology (1996) and Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular and Integrative Physiology (2003) at the University of California, Davis. In her graduate research, she investigated the effects of altered gravity environments on energy balance in rodents. Prior to her appointment at USRA, Dr. Warren spent one year as an associate investigator in the Laboratory of Cell Growth at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center investigating the effects of dietary fatty acids on the development of prostate cancer. Liz has been interested in space physiology and medicine since she was in high school, and her goal is to continue space life sciences research that is critical to the vision for space exploration. Following their return to Earth, astronauts experience disturbances in their ability to walk and maintain postural stability due to neural adaptation to the microgravity conditions of space flight. At present, no operational training intervention is available to mitigate postflight locomotor disturbances. The goal of her present research is to develop an in-flight balance and gait countermeasure. As a result of this training, a subject learns to solve a class of motor problems, rather than a specific motor solution to one problem. That is, the subject learns response generalizability or the ability to "learn to learn" under a variety of environmental constraints. It is anticipated that this training will accelerate recovery of locomotor function during re-adaptation to gravitational environments following spaceflight, thus facilitating neural adaptation to unit (Earth) gravity and partial (Mars) gravity after long-duration spaceflight.
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LARA ELISABETH WARREN, Ph.D. 
In her current research at Johnson Space Center’s Neurosciences Laboratory, Dr. Warren is examining the effects of training modality on adaptive generalization. Her work is in support of Dr. Jacob Bloomberg’s development of an in-flight sensorimotor training regimen to facilitate the recovery of locomotor function after long-duration spaceflight. 
The training regimen being developed is based on the concept of variable practice. During this type of training, the subject gains experience producing the appropriate adaptive motor behavior under a variety of sensory conditions and response constraints. Astronauts will conduct their nominal in-flight treadmill exercise while being exposed to variations in visual flow patterns, body load and speed. These variations will challenge the locomotor system repeatedly, thereby promoting adaptive reorganization in locomotor behavior.