Professor Lena Ting has been named the inaugural McCamish Foundation Distinguished Chair at Emory University this fall, an endowed faculty position supported by a partnership between the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and the McCamish Foundation. The Emory Board of Trustees approved the appointment in late September.

The new endowed chair recognizes high-performing faculty members in Coulter BME working in areas related to Parkinson’s disease and whose work has great potential to impact treatment of the condition. It’s one of four endowed positions created through a transformational gift from the foundation in late 2020 that also established the McCamish Parkinson’s Disease Innovation Program.

“I am honored to be able to recognize Lena Ting as our inaugural McCamish Chair at Emory. She is the ideal faculty member to receive this additional support for her research,” said Machelle Pardue, interim Wallace H. Coulter Department Chair. “Her work on the neuromechanics of human balance and gait presents many exciting opportunities to transform our understanding of how Parkinson’s impairs movement, and she will be an important part of our work with the foundation to develop revolutionary approaches to the disease.”

Appointment as the distinguished chair comes with flexible discretionary funds to support student researchers, explore uncharted areas of research that could prompt external grants, and cultivate relationships with industry and research community leaders.

“The funding from the McCamish Foundation Distinguished Chair will allow us to more rapidly pursue novel approaches to probing and understanding brain-body interactions in healthy and impaired movement, including Parkinson’s disease,” Ting said. “With these resources, we can undertake impactful collaborative research fueled by our best students and postdocs being trained at the interface of neuroscience, biomechanics, engineering, and clinical research.”

The University System of Georgia Board of Regents previously approved three other McCamish Foundation endowed positions at Georgia Tech supporting the work of Garrett Stanley, James Dahlman, and Annabelle Singer.