Pursuing a passion for concussion research
After helping the athletic trainer during one of her high school’s football games, Destinee Grove ’17 recognized the amount of head impacts that players were taking and how that might affect their behavior—linking the psychology and sports medicine fields. She’s been hooked on the subject ever since.
After helping the athletic trainer during one of her high school’s football games, Destinee Grove ’17 recognized the amount of head impacts that players were taking and how that might affect their behavior—linking the psychology and sports medicine fields. She’s been hooked on the subject ever since.
Destinee Grove ’17, who graduated with degrees in exercise and sport science, and psychology, came to Carolina as a Morehead-Cain Scholar from Wagram, a tiny town in southeastern North Carolina’s Scotland County. In the Sandhills, Friday nights are serious business. Scotland High School’s varsity football team is a perennial gridiron favorite.
It was there on the sidelines as an assistant to the team’s athletic trainer where Grove began to see how helmet-to-helmet impacts could cause concussions and possibly affect player behavior off the field. She was inspired to understand the links between psychology and sports medicine.
That curiosity led Grove to Carolina’s Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury CenterOpens in new window, a center that seeks to improve the prevention, evaluation, management and rehabilitation of sport-related traumatic brain injuries through research, education and clinical practice. She worked alongside neuroscientist Kevin Guskiewicz, dean of the UNC College of Arts & Sciences and the center’s co-director, who conducts innovative research on sport-related concussions. As a MacArthur Grant recipient, he’s been called a “genius.” Time magazine has called him a “game changer.” His and the center’s work has influenced concussion guidelines and recommendations set forth by the NCAA and NFL, among other organizations.
Grove played an integral role in this ongoing research. She completed a senior thesis and contributed her own research. And after turning her mortarboard tassel, she is continuing the work she started at Carolina, pursuing a master’s degree in kinesiology at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Kevin Guskiewicz was appointed interim chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on February 6, 2019.
