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In September 2022, I began working as a clinical research coordinator at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY. I run thoracic medicine oncology studies, handle interactions with potential and current patients, and make sure they run smoothly.

I previously worked with the Johns Hopkins Movement Disorders Center (2/2018 - 8/2022, taking on the role of full-time research assistant/coordinator in summer 2020 following my graduation).

I coordinated two pilot studies:

1. An investigational device study in cooperation with MedRhythms, Inc. and Boston University, that used music and a feedback loop to improve Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients' gaits and walking speeds (paper to come in the coming months)
2. A study intended to differentiate the skin biopsy and CSF samples between patients with various manifestations of PD with dementia as a comorbidity (multiple system atrophy, Parkinson's Disease with dementia, and dementia w/Lewy bodies) in an attempt to understand what makes each diagnosis unique on a molecular level

I further worked on projects affiliated with the Hopkins Center for Music and Medicine under the leadership of principal investigator Dr. Alexander Pantelyat, and I've been involved with two of the center's premier studies:

1. "PD Strummers" -- a project that taught 24 people with moderate to advanced Parkinson's Disease to play guitar; participants saw improvements in quality of life and upper extremity function; paper published in the journal Parkinson's Disease, 06/25/2022
2. "Drum-PDHD" -- a similar project to what I mentioned above except it involved eight participants (five with Parkinson's Disease and 3 with Huntington's Disease) and their spouses, and utilized drumming/percussion instead of guitar playing.

My notable work for these projects has included designing consents/IRB proposals from scratch, performing cognitive tests, administering questionnaires, assisting with data analysis, and recruiting new participants (more info on my CV).

I also assisted Hopkins in their collection of data for UCSF's 4 Repeat Tauopathy Neuroimaging Initiative -- Cycle 2 (4RTNI-2) as well as two longitudinal studies (PIs Drs. Alexander Pantelyat and Liana Rosenthal) examining the cognitive and physical manifestations of PD and atypical parkinsonism in an effort to determine if any indicators correlate more highly with some variants than with others (Longitudinal Biomarkers of Atypical Parkinsonian Disorders; Biomarker Discovery and Validation in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy).

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Aside from working with the JHMI CMM, I also spent time as an assistant in the laboratory of Dr. Jeffery Bowen, a social psychologist specializing in the field of romantic relationships.

My work for his lab involved using the Linguistic Category Model (LCM) to characterize passages that our study participants have written about their significant others in an effort to determine correlation between how long-distance relationship partners describe their SOs and how close, in-person partners think of each other.

I also spent time with Dr. Bowen designing a study that aimed to investigate a possible correlation between construal concreteness in romantic partner description and the way the partner was presented to a participant (e.g., via a picture, their name, or the term "my romantic partner").

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Beyond the Bowen lab, my primary research interests are in the fields of music and cognition, and I'm currently planning a study whose goal is to examine a causal relationship, if any, between sight reading (a musical phenomenon by which someone can read a piece of music play it without prep time) and executive function.

Click here to read an abbreviated proposal of my project (that I used to unsuccessfully apply for a NSF GRFP). Should you desire the entire proposal, please email me at colinmcgregor [at] jhmi [dot] edu and I'll send you the full 15-page PDF.

Photo courtesy of The Union newspaper (CA)