SIUEs Maria Fernandez del Valle, PhD, assistant professor of exercise physiology in the School of Education, Health and Human Behaviors Department of Applied Health.

SIUEs Maria Fernandez del Valle, PhD, assistant professor of exercise physiology in the School of Education, Health and Human Behaviors Department of Applied Health.

SIUEs Maria Fernandez del Valle, PhD, assistant professor of exercise physiology in the School of Education, Health and Human Behaviors Department of Applied Health.

SIUEs Maria Fernandez del Valle, PhD, assistant professor of exercise physiology in the School of Education, Health and Human Behaviors Department of Applied Health.

Our Education: SIUEs Fernandez del Valle committed to optimizing womens health

EDWARDSVILLE Southern Illinois University Edwardsvilles Maria Fernandez del Valle, PhD, is researching optimizing womens health.

The assistant professor of exercise physiology in the School of Education, Health and Human Behaviors Department of Applied Health is a prime example of a teacher-scholar who has established multi-disciplinary collaborations and consistently involves students to pursue high impact research.

My research focuses on improving exercise prescription through different lines of study to help individuals optimize their health, she said. Currently, were targeting women, and conducting research on cardiac fat and function to determine how different modes of exercise can help us improve both.

I want to improve the way we prescribe exercise, she said. We need a larger sample size to clearly see data trends, but early indications show that we can have a high impact on cardiac fat around the heart with resistance training alone. The implication then would be that obese women should do resistance training to target more internal fat rather than the fat you see on the outside. Because, internal fat is what I linked to the development of metabolic and cardiac diseases.

Two of her primary collaborators are Jon Klingensmith, PhD, assistant professor in the SIUE School of Engineerings Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Pamela Woodard, PhD, with the Washington University School of Medicine.

Fernandez del Valle is also a research mentor for students, most of whom have earned competitive research awards and Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities accolades.

We can teach in the classroom and explain concepts, but when students are in a lab, I can see their faces and how it just clicks that Oh, now thats what this means and This is connecting with this, she said. Without my collaborators and students assistance, this work would not be possible. It involves human subjects, assessment training and implementation, data reporting and much more.

Before working in this lab, I wasnt sure what I wanted to do post-graduation, said graduate student and research assistant Paige Davis. Now, I know I want to work in a research lab at a college or government agency. I love the mix of human interaction and data entry, and how everything comes together to achieve interesting results.

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Our Education: SIUE's Fernandez del Valle committed to optimizing women's health - The Edwardsville Intelligencer