Nick Stergiou

HPER

International Conference on Infant Studies

Next Spring and for the first time, I will be teaching a newly developed course, PE 8420 Motor Development. There has never been a course like this at UNO. However, a variety of people in the past, from Psychology, Physical Education, Special Education, and Exercise Science has mentioned to me the importance of such a class. I currently have a 5-year (2006-2010) K25 award from the NIH to become a more clinically oriented scientist in the area of pediatrics. As part of this award, I have taken a variety of courses at UNO (i.e. Child Psychology) and UNMC (i.e. Pediatric Physical Therapy) and I perform research on infant sitting postural control. It is really amazing, that in all these courses when the topic of motor development was to be discussed, the instructors asked me to do the teaching! This clearly demonstrated the need for such a course and the absolute lack of expertise in this area at UNO. Therefore, I sought knowledge in Motor Development from attending conferences, such as the one that I received funding from UCAT to attend. Fortunately, this was a great meeting and I plan to incorporate a significant amount of information from this conference into my new class. I was also able to speak with a variety of motor developmentalists in order to discuss how to teach such a class. This information is invaluable for the instruction and the teaching-learning process of the Motor Development class that I plan to teach at UNO. This class will be attended by a variety of graduate majors in areas such as Special Education, Exercise Science, Child Psychology, etc. Lastly, I also had the opportunity to present three posters disseminating my research in infant sitting posture.

I would like everybody to visit our website http://www.unomaha.edu/infant/ where we have plenty of information on motor development and reports from all the meetings that we attend. In addition, whoever is interested in reading more about the meeting and the specific sections can visit the meeting’s website at http://www.isisweb.org/ where the entire oral and poster program of the meeting is located.

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