Dr. Gammon M. Earhart, Class of 1990

Dr. Gammon M. Earhart is a physical therapist and neuroscientist. After graduating from Oxford, she attended Arcadia University (then known as Beaver College), earning a Bachelor of Arts in psychobiology in 1994 and a Master of Science in physical therapy in 1996.

Upon completion of her physical therapy training, Dr. Earhart enrolled in the Movement Science PhD Program at Washington University in St. Louis. She studied nervous system control of movement, focusing on how the spinal cord and brain control walking.
 
Dr. Earhart earned her PhD in 2000, after which she pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at Oregon Health & Science University. As a postdoctoral fellow, she studied how people adapt their walking patterns to meet environmental challenges and how damage to the brain or inner ear impacts ability to adapt walking patterns.

In 2004, Dr. Earhart accepted a faculty position in the Program in Physical Therapy at Washington University School of Medicine. In the past 10 years she rose through the faculty ranks from Instructor, to Assistant Professor, to Associate Professor with Tenure, to Full Professor.

Throughout this time, Dr. Earhart has been a dedicated teacher of neuroscience to physical therapy graduate students and has been an active researcher. In July 2014, she assumed a leadership position as the chair of the Program in Physical Therapy and also began serving her term as President of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) Section on Research.
 
Dr. Earhart directs two research laboratories, the Locomotor Control Laboratory and the Physical Activity Research Center. Her work focuses primarily on Parkinson disease (PD), and ranges from basic neuroimaging studies aimed at understanding neural control of movement to clinical trials that compare the effects of different forms of exercise on physical function and PD progression.