When an article about her research on dizziness and disorientation, which recently received a $200,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health, ran in the Portland Press Herald and other Maine papers, Associate Professor of Mathematics Jan Holly received phone calls and e-mails of appreciation from people who suffer from inner-ear disorders. “One of the women who called me said, ‘Oh, it’s so good to see someone studying this, because you don’t hear about it much,’” Holly recalled.

While the focus of the grant is ultimately to help people with vestibular disorders, which cause dizziness, nausea, and disorientation, Holly’s role is way behind the scenes. A mathematical modeler, Holly uses physical experiments to understand people’s perceptions of various movements. For example, “You take a person, strap ’em into a chair … it’s basically on sort of a track where the chair can go back and forth,” she said. “You just slide someone back and forth along the track, in the dark, and you say to them, ‘Are you upright? Or are you being tilted? And how far are you moving?’ And the interesting thing is some people say they’re being tilted when they’re not being tilted at all.”

Using data from this and many similar experiments, Holly creates computer mathematical models to predict what people might feel like during various motions. Meanwhile, her student researchers with mathematics and computer-science backgrounds work on computer animations to represent the movements. And she relies on math-biology double majors, too. “They often help me out by reading ... and consolidating the literature on how perception of motion takes place in the brain—the physiology behind it,” she said.

While this current grant is aimed at helping people with inner-ear disorders, Holly thinks her research will ultimately be used to predict and prevent disorientation in healthy people as well, such as astronauts for the transition in and out of a zero-gravity environment and pilots and who can misperceive motion in the air, sometimes leading to plane crashes.

The interdisciplinary nature of the work, and the practical application, contribute to Holly’s enthusiasm. “The core of what I love to do is math. However, I really like the fact that this type of math is being applied to something useful, and so it has a longer-term motivation,” Holly said. “I like being able to do something useful.”

—R.J.