Clemson's Muth receives international fellowship
Friday, April 25, 2008Eric Muth, a psychology professor at Clemson University, has received a Humboldt Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Foundation. The foundation is a non-profit organization established by the Federal Republic of Germany for the promotion of international research cooperation. It enables highly qualified scholars not living in Germany to spend extended periods for research in Germany and promotes the ensuing academic contacts. The fellowship will support a year of research. Muth will work with his German sponsor, Paul Enck, director of research of the Department of Internal Medicine, Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy at the University Hospitals Tubingen. Muth and Enck will research eating disorders. 'I am very excited about the opportunity to build international collaborations and get reacquainted to a research area that I have been away from for some time,' Muth said. As a graduate student, Muth worked in the area of gastrointestinal psychophysiology and completed a dissertation examining factors that influence functional dyspepsia, a disorder of the upper gastrointestinal tract associated with symptoms such as nausea and bloating with no apparent physiological cause. However, following graduate school, he spent three years in the US Navy as an aerospace experimental psychologist working on applied human factors problems. 'Much of the research I have completed here at Clemson has been a continuation of that applied human factors work,' he said. 'Recently, Dr. Adam Hoover, my collaborator here at Clemson, and I have become interested in developing biofeedback devices to help individuals become more aware of their physiological need to eat. My fellowship and collaboration with Dr. Enck will form the basic science foundation for the applied work we are doing here at Clemson.' Muth will examine the utility of a 'water load test' to differentiate between genders, eating patterns and healthy subjects versus patients with eating disorders and obesity. The long-term goal of this work, according to Muth, is to determine if the maladaptive component of an eating disorder or obese patient's eating pattern is perceptual, physiological or both. This would potentially allow for treatment to be focused on correcting the perceptual, physiological or mixed problem. For example, individuals with maladaptive eating patterns could be given biofeedback from their stomach's electrical rhythms and trained to pay more attention to their physiological state, allowing them to adopt a better eating pattern. Clemson Vice President for Research and Economic Development Chris Przirembel said the Humboldt Research Fellowship is highly competitive and awarded only to researchers who are recognized internationally for their academic qualifications. 'It is an honor for Clemson University to have one of our faculty members receive this internationally prestigious fellowship,' he said. 'We look forward to seeing the results of professor Muth's work and the long-term impact of the associated collaborative research programs.' The Humboldt Foundation promotes an active worldwide network of scholars. Individual sponsorship during periods spent in Germany and longstanding follow-up contacts have been hallmarks of the foundation's work since 1953. For more information go to http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/en/index.htm. For more information about Clemson's graduate programs in psychology, please visit: www.clemson.edu/psych/graduate/index.htm.
