Welcome! We are a research lab based in New York City, NY. We are dedicated to investigating what leads to falls and what can be done to help and prevent falls. A fall may be defined as “inadvertently coming to rest on the ground, floor or other lower level, excluding intentional change in 
position to rest in furniture, wall, or other objects.”
These are the reasons that we are dedicating our efforts to this issue:
- About 1 out of 3 older Americans–meaning 12 million people aged 65 or over–has a fall each year.
- Approximately 50% of those who fall once will fall again within a year.
- Approximately 16,000 people die as a result of a fall each year. It is the leading cause of mortality from injury among older people.
- The consequences can result in reduced mobility, difficulty performing basic self-care, social isolation, deterioration of health, and even death.
- Most interventions do not address anxiety in the aftermath of falling.
- Despite a long-standing literature on depression, fear of falling and recent confirmation of partial and full posttraumatic stress disorder among those who have fallen, no interventions currently exist to address the spectrum of anxiety for those affected.
We have two major areas that we are working on: helping people who develop anxiety after falling and prevention of falling.
We help people learn to engage in healthy behaviors that reduce falling.
We are currently conducting an NIMH-funded clinical trial in which we are studying how beneficial a well-established treatment for anxiety is for individuals that have been injured by falls.
We collaborate with researchers and local organizations to do education programming on falls prevention and coping with injury.