Sayers John Miller, III, assistant professor of kinesiology in the College of Health and Human Development at Penn State, has received the Most Distinguished Alumni Award from the Professional Football Athletic Trainers Society (PFATS) for 2013. He will be presented with the award on Feb. 20, at the PFATS annual meeting to be held in Indianapolis, Ind.

Do children suffering from concussions recover faster and have a better prognosis than young adults? Researchers in the Center for Sport Concussion Research and Service at Penn State aim to answer that question with the help of a $100,000 grant from NFL Charities.

Menopausal women who exercise may experience fewer hot flashes in the 24 hours following physical activity, according to health researchers. In general, women who are relatively inactive or are overweight or obese tend to have a risk of increased symptoms of perceived hot flashes, said Steriani Elavsky, assistant professor of kinesiology at Penn State.

"Some physiological explanations would suggest that performing physical activity could increase hot flashes because it acutely increases body core temperature," said Elavsky. To the contrary, the researchers found that this premise was not true -- on average, the women in the study experienced fewer hot-flash symptoms after exercising.

Sayers John Miller, III, assistant professor of kinesiology at Penn State, has received the 2012 National Athletic Trainers' Association (NATA) Continuing Education Excellence Award.

The skeletal structure of the foot and ankle differs significantly between human sprinters and nonsprinters, according to Penn State researchers. Their findings not only help explain why some people are faster runners than others, but also may be useful in helping people who have difficulty walking, such as older adults and children with cerebral palsy.

People with Parkinson's disease swing their arms asymmetrically -- one arm swings less than the other -- when walking. This unusual movement is easily detected early when drugs and other interventions may help slow the disease, according to Penn State researchers who used inexpensive accelerometers on the arms of Parkinson's disease patients to measure arm swing.

Gregory Sawicki, of the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, will be speaking at the Kinesiology 590 Colloquium series at 4:15 p.m. on Dec. 8, in Room 135 Reber Building on Penn State's University Park campus. His topic of discussion is "Human PoWeR: of Wearable Robots for Locomotion Assistance." For more information, call 814-863-0847.

The Penn State Department of Kinesiology has announced speakers for this fall's edition of their 590 Colloquium Course.