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Nursing professor Hyunhwa “Henna” Lee is looking deeper into the mysteries of the human brain.

She studies biobehavioral for human symptoms, specifically looking at symptoms after a concussion or mild traumatic brain injury. Lee’s research roots grew during her undergraduate work. She was passionate about psychiatry and psychological health. She started just focusing on behavior but then began exploring more mental health and lifelong adversities. “I was interested in early life adversity,” she said, “and how that affects long-term lifelong medical and also physical mental health.”

A major challenge to studying psychiatric mental health, according to Lee, is that despite sophisticated tools and machines, there are many causes and symptoms that go undetected and occur together, such as co-morbidity. “It's still the area with a lack of advanced technology available for screening and understanding what's going on about the underlying mechanism for it, like schizophrenia, PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), depression, and anxiety,” she said. As a result, Lee’s research interests turned towards genetics. “I started including the biomarker (measurable body trait) in the study,” she recalled, “and I kept my initial interests on life adversity and how that affects later in humans' life.”

A crux of Lee’s research is exploring the impact of psychological or physical trauma on a person’s development, specifically pertaining to stimuli such as a concussion. “Even if two people get a similar kind of concussion in the same scenario, one person can suffer longer or (have) more severe post-injury symptoms versus the other person (who) may recover within three to four weeks, which is known to be kind of average time point for recovery from concussion,” Lee said. Her goal is identifying the extent of these developmental impacts, which contrary to popular opinion, may come from just one concussion as opposed to many. “People say multiple (injuries) definitely will give more significant impact in the person's later life, like accelerated aging and neurodegenerative disorder,” she said, “but now people believe it's not just (the) number of injuries. It could be what that person experienced before the first injury, including psychological trauma.”

As part of her research, Lee and her team explore more than memory and cognition. Working with physical therapy and computer science groups, they developed a smartphone app to gauge walking balance; an eye tracking device measuring sensory or locomotor function; and comprehensive interview screening, noting a person’s last injury. During COVID-19, her team created home-based virtual exercise interventions for mild concussion cases based on walking and cognitive dual-tasks; they found improvement in cognitive and psychological health and are currently analyzing saliva microRNA data that may be linked to such functional improvement. Recently, Lee received several grants from ���ӽ紫ý’s Sports Research and Innovation Initiative, interviewing athletes and training staff to look for potential effects of trauma.