Doctoral student Ashley Goodwin was named winner of the NEACSM 2020 Doctoral Category Student Investigator Competition for her presentation titled "Attenuated Response of Muscle Deoxygenation at Higher Workloads Determined by Near-Infrared Spectroscopy".  Further, as the highest ranked abstract of any graduate student, she was also awarded the President's Cup, a competition of all research poster presentations at the Fall meeting. Ashley was selected from approximately 30 graduate student abstract submissions. The award includes a $500 prize, and a travel grant of $1,200 in addition to a registration waiver to travel to the National ACSM conference in Washington, D.C. in 2021.The Awards Ceremony was held, virtually, on Friday, October 16, 2020. Ashley's project, led by Dr. Carol Ewing Garber, professor and program director in Applied Physiology and director of the EXerT Clinic, sought to characterize the relationship between change in muscle deoxygenation during incremental exercise and maximum workload achieved at peak exercise, in a healthy sample. The purpose was to better understand this relationship in a healthy population so that the model could be used to understand exercise intolerance in clinical populations. The study serves as her pilot study for her dissertation work, and is supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NIH1K01HD084690-01A1), and the Muscular Dystrophy Association. The collaborators on the project also include Jacqueline Montes, PT, EdD, Ipek Ensari, PhD, and Ashwini Rao, OT, EdD. The full abstract can be accessed here.