Associate Professor
UNO Biomechanics
Dr. Likens is a quantitatively trained movement scientist with broad education and training in biomechanics, statistics, cognitive science, and motor control. His PhD work was heavily focused on quantitative methods in the field of motor control, where he completed dozens of credit hours on experimental design and statistics courses including multivariate statistics, multilevel models, structural equation modeling, and time series analysis. Dr. Likens is the Director of the Quantitative Analysis Research Core (QUARC), an arm of the Center for Research in Human Movement Variability (MOVCENTR) that is housed in the Department of Biomechanics as the University of Nebraska Omaha. There, he has gained extensive expertise in applying and developing time series analysis, power analysis, statistical modeling, and machine learning techniques to problems in biomechanics and motor control. His current and future teaching assignments are on topics such as Advanced Biostatistics in Biomechanics and Nonlinear Time Series Analysis of Human Movement. Dr. Likens has given numerous workshops on quantitative methods including the Nonlinear Analysis Workshop hosted annually at MOVCENTR. Most recently, he contributed to a workshop at ETH Zurich, but Dr. Likens also leads well-attended workshops at major conferences (American Society of Biomechanics, International Society of Posture and Gait Research) on topics such as fractal analysis, recurrence quantification analysis, and symbolic regression. His early research focused on describing statistical patterns that emerge in neural activity and human movements like those involved in gait and posture as well complex forms of behavior like driving. A major focus of his ongoing research is to understand how statistical patterns in gait and posture change over natural course of aging and as the result of disease and injury. Other recent work has focused on developing new time series analysis methods for studying human movements and other forms of behavior. In the past, he has received federal funding from the NIH in the form of pilot grants that resulted in several book chapters and manuscripts published in high impact journals. Relevant for the current project, Dr. Likens recently completed a project funded National Strategic Research Institute (NSRI) and the US Army where he is used this collective experience to build a software toolkit to monitor soldier movement and physiology. He is currently funded by the National Science Foundation where he is leverages time series analysis and machine learning to study the uniqueness of human gait and its relationship to aging and disease; and local funding sources to investigate augmented reality and mathematical modeling for the purpose of gait rehabilitation. As PI and CO-PI on those grants, he is responsible for all aspects of those projects, ranging from the budget to personnel and research. As the PI for the proposed work, he will manage all aspects of the project.
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