Rate My Professor Teresa Chen

Dr. Teresa Chen serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physical Therapy within Ithaca College's School of Health Sciences and Human Performance, a position she has held since 2020. She earned her Ph.D. in Human Physiology from the University of Oregon, where her doctoral research focused on biomechanics and motor control, along with an M.S. in Physical Therapy and a B.S. in Physical Therapy from National Taiwan University. Prior to her academic appointment, Dr. Chen practiced as a licensed physical therapist since 2010, working extensively with elite Olympic weightlifters on injury prevention, rehabilitation protocols, and support during international competitions. Her career encompasses over nine years of diverse teaching experience across classrooms, clinical settings, laboratories, sports fields, and cadaver rooms, with a commitment to fostering inclusive, student-centered learning environments that promote equity, belonging, and individualized student growth.

Dr. Chen's research program examines mobility impairments across the lifespan, emphasizing age-related changes in cognitive-motor interactions, lower extremity biomechanics, pediatric gait and foot development, balance control during gait and obstacle-crossing following fatigue, inter-joint coordination under cognitive demands and muscle fatigue, pelvic-trunk coordination in sports such as baseball pitching, markerless 3D motion capture for degenerative lumbar disease evaluation, intrinsic foot muscle fatigue effects on postural control, dual-task interference like phone texting on gait, and physiological benefits of reducing sedentary behavior. Notable publications include Chen and Chou (2025) 'Balance Control during Obstacle-Crossing in Older Adults after a Fatiguing Protocol' in Gait & Posture; Wang et al. (2025) 'Pelvic Control and Pelvic-Trunk Coordination as Key Determinants of Pitching Velocity in Baseball Pitchers' in Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine; Chen and Chou (2022) 'Gait balance control after fatigue: Effects of age and cognitive demand' and 'Inter-joint coordination variability during a sit-to-stand fatiguing protocol' in Gait & Posture and Journal of Biomechanics, respectively; and Chen et al. (2018) 'Concurrent Phone Texting Alters Crossing Behavior and Induces Gait Imbalance During Obstacle Crossing' in Gait & Posture. She actively mentors student researchers, co-authoring presentations at conferences including the APTA New York Conference, American Society of Biomechanics, and World Congress of Biomechanics, and integrates artificial intelligence into physical therapy education and movement analysis. Dr. Chen teaches graduate courses such as Applied Biomechanics, Pathokinesiology, Therapeutic Exercise, Electrotherapeutic Modalities, and supervises clinical orthopedics labs and research projects.