Papers
3
Total Citations
85
H-Index
2
About
Mark G. Carpenter is a leading researcher in human balance control and sensorimotor adaptation, with a focus on how the nervous system maintains upright posture under challenging conditions. His work bridges rehabilitation engineering and fundamental neuroscience, particularly in populations with spinal cord injury (SCI) and age-related sensorimotor decline. Carpenter’s most-cited paper (67 citations) demonstrates that overground walking with a robotic exoskeleton can elicit trunk muscle activity in individuals with high-thoracic motor-complete SCI, challenging long-held assumptions about muscle sparing and opening new avenues for rehabilitation. He has also explored interlimb transfer of locomotor adaptations, showing that adaptations to velocity-dependent force fields during unipedal walking are surprisingly limited between limbs—a key insight for designing gait retraining protocols. More recently, his work on learning to stand with artificially induced delays reveals that the sensorimotor system can adapt to uncertainty without causing instability when returning to natural conditions, offering implications for fall prevention in aging and neurological disorders. Carpenter’s research is notable for its direct translational impact, combining rigorous experimental design with real-world rehabilitation applications.
Research Focus
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