Life Span Institute Blog

When 11-year-old Xigrid Soto moved to the continental United States from Puerto Rico with her family, her new community and the school lacked the support she needed. “I was placed in a classroom for special needs by accident,” Soto said. “I had to teach myself English, and that was a hard experience. And so, from that, I was really determined to have it not happen to other people.”

  Investigators at a KU education research center have distilled twenty years of education research into a new book focused on an equity-based system to support all students.

A field guide to research on the scope, methods and etiology of addiction published by Cambridge University Press and featuring chapters written by three KU scientists aims to be a comprehensive resource for researchers in this broad field.

On July 26, 1990, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act marked a new era for people with disabilities. The landmark legislation prohibiting discrimination based on disability aimed to assure that that people with disabilities have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else. The law covered several areas of public life, including employment, education, transportation, and public and private places that are open to the general public.

For Brian Boyd, director of the Juniper Gardens Children’s Project at the KU Life Span Institute, a passion for autism research ignited at a summer camp job during his undergraduate years. It led to a career dedicated to early interventions for children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and a focus on community-based research.

As a volunteer at an Olathe, Kan., nursing home, 19-year-old Isaac Swindler enjoyed helping people by escorting residents to the chapel, bringing them meals, and assisting with laundry. But when the nursing home was forced to limit the number of visitors to the facility in response to the spread of COVID-19, Isaac became one of the millions of Americans to lose his position – and his routine.  

Apprehension is expected before a traveler boards a flight, whether it’s anxiety about airline safety or worrying about a delayed flight.  Yet for people who depend on wheelchairs to move through the world, the possibility of damage to their chairs poses the biggest stressor of them all. Wheelchairs aren’t just an object or item to be checked like a suitcase for a flight; they are an extension of the user and a vital part of their daily lives.

A pioneering research project at KU may one day give voice to individuals robbed of their speech by neuromuscular diseases such as ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. 

The child in the chair looks like she’s preparing to play a video game. She leans toward the monitor in a darkened room, the dim light of the screen illuminating her face. A dot appears on the screen. But instead of zapping the dot with a game controller, she tracks its movement only with her eyes. Throughout the test, a camera mounted to the monitor records the movement in fine detail: the pace, the direction, the focus. 

We have all had moments when we chose to skip the gym and eat the piece of cake or take the extra helping, even though we knew that we wanted to lose weight. These decisions are impacted by delay discounting: in this case, the reward of eating fattening food is immediate, while the pay-off of good health and weight maintenance associated with exercising and avoiding unhealthy foods is largely delayed.