The Study Team | TRAIN Study

Principal Investigators

Zachary Kerr, PhD, MPH
Zachary Kerr is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of North Carolina, and serves as a core faculty member for the Gfeller Center and the Injury Prevention Research Center at UNC-CH. His research focuses on the development and evaluation of injury prevention strategies in sport settings across the lifespan by addressing both behavioral and epidemiological outcomes. Through his collaborations with experts in injury prevention, athletic training, and sports medicine, he has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles on injury surveillance and traumatic sport-related injuries.

Johna Register-Mihalik, PhD, LAT, ATC
Johna Register-Mihalik is an Associate Professor in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science. In addition to her role as a Gfeller Center core faculty member, she is the Co-Director of the STAR Heel Performance Laboratory and she serves as a core faculty member with the Injury Prevention Research Center at UNC-CH. Her primary work centers on improved care, education and behavior change concerning TBI among physically active children and adolescents as well as novel preventions. She is a Certified Athletic Trainer who has provided care at the youth, high school, and college sport levels. She was one of the first researchers to utilize health behavior theory in the study of concussion reporting and related behaviors and to examine early rehabilitation interventions across different levels of sport.

Co-Investigators

Stephen Marshall, PhD
Stephen Marshall is the Director of the Injury Prevention Research Center and a Professor of Epidemiology in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at UNC, and is a core faculty member in the Gfeller Center. In his capacity as Director of the Injury Prevention Research Center, he oversees a nationally-recognized injury prevention research center that has been funded by the CDC as one of the nation’s 11 centers of excellence in injury prevention research. He has expertise in injury prevention and control, epidemiological studies of sports injury, and in the statistical analysis of sports medicine data. His areas of research within sports medicine include monitoring of concussion incidence using injury surveillance systems. He is closely associated with the Datalys Center for Sports Injury Research and Prevention. The Datalys Center operates the NCAA’s Injury Surveillance Program. He has worked with faculty and students at the Matthew Gfeller Center for over decade in a wide range of studies addressing concussion incidence, management, and prevention.

Kevin Guskiewicz, PhD, ATC, FACSM, FNATA
Kevin Guskiewicz is the 12th chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Kenan Distinguished Professor, Athletic Trainer, and the founding director of the Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center at UNC-CH, where he has served on faculty since 1995. Over the past 22 years, his clinical research program has focused on sport-related concussion and their effect on balance and neuropsychological function in high school and collegiate athletes, the biomechanics of sport concussion, and the long-term neurological effects of concussion in retired professional football players. He has been awarded Fellowship in the American College of Sports Medicine in 2003, the National Academy of Kinesiology in 2006, and the National Athletic Trainers’ Association in 2008. In 2010 he was named to the NCAA’s Concussion Committee and the NFL’s Head, Neck, and Spine Committee. In September 2011, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, given annually to individuals who “show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work.”

Jason Mihalik, PhD, CAT(C), ATC
Jason Mihalik is an Associate Professor in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science. He is the Co-Director of the Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center. Jason’s primary research interest intersects head trauma biomechanics with clinical outcomes in civilian athletes and military war-fighters. He investigates the effectiveness of innovative concussion assessment, management, and rehabilitation technologies. He is additionally interested in the interrelationships between ocular and vestibular function, as well as the utility of neuroimaging and neurophysiology, in the context of the concussion management paradigm. Jason has over 10 years of experience implementing studies utilizing various head impact monitoring devices in multiple sports and was one of the first researchers to utilize this technology in the youth sport setting.

Vivian Go, PhD
Vivian Go is a professor in the Department of Health Education at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. As an implementation scientist and social epidemiologist, she has spent the past 15 years conducting both qualitative and survey research on development and evaluation of behavioral interventions in Vietnam, Thailand, and India. She is trained as an implementation science researcher, recently graduating from the 2-year, NIH-funded Implementation Research Institute led by Washington University in St. Louis. She teaches an Intervention Development and Evaluation course at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was an instructor for the WHO implementation science and tropical diseases online course, and is mentor and instructor for the Implementation Science Research course with Dr. Brian Pence that is part of the curriculum of Dr. Hosseinipour’s D43 award in Malawi. Her most recent interest is in the scale up of evidence-based interventions into routine practice.

Project Manager

Paula Gildner, MPH
Paula Gildner is Senior Project Manager at the Injury Prevention Research Center. She received her Master’s in Public Health from the Gillings School of Global Public Health at UNC Chapel Hill. She manages multiple studies on traumatic brain injuries and sports-related concussions in conjunction with faculty and staff from the Matthew Gfeller Center at UNC. She has extensive experience in the conduct of population-based research with the Latino community and has also managed research studies on intimate partner violence and older adult falls prevention.

Program Coordinator

Samuel Livingston, BS
Samuel Livingston joined the Injury Prevention Research Center at UNC-CH in 2021. He is a recent graduate of Clemson University, where he received a B.S. in Biological Sciences and Microbiology. He focuses his effort on the day to day operations of the TRAIN study and development of the online training modules. He has previously worked on research projects involving diabetes prevention and management and initiatives to improve patient-provider communication.