Sept. 11, 2019
Shelby Baez is an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology in the College of Education. Baez is a certified athletic trainer whose work focuses on the impact of psychological responses on clinical outcomes after traumatic knee injuries.
I’m an athletic training researcher with the goal to help ACL patients overcome their fear. My general research goal is to provide research that will ultimately improve patients and their care, especially in patients who have history of anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction.
The goal of this surgery is to allow these patients to return back to sport and engage in physical activity, but they simply aren’t returning back to sport and they are not engaging in life long levels of physical activity.
My research wants to examine psychological factors that may be impeding these patient’s abilities to return back to sport. However, I want to look at it from an objective side and start to be able to quantify how the psychological factors are actually presenting in this population.
I want to examine what we can do as rehabilitation specialists, athletic trainers and physical therapists to be able to improve these outcomes and decrease their fear to allow them to return to sport and engage in physical activity.