W&L’s Sarp Sahin ’26 Selected to Present at Sports Medicine Conference First-year Johnson Scholar to offer preliminary research on foot-limb dominance and neuromuscular asymmetry in pediatric soccer players.

By Emily Innes
January 20, 2023

Washington and Lee University first-year Johnson Scholar Sarp Sahin ’26 will be attending the 2023 Pediatric Research in Sports Medicine Society (PRiSM) Conference to deliver a podium presentation on his research study titled “Association Between the Degree of Foot-Limb Dominance and Lower Limb Neuromuscular Asymmetry in Adolescent Soccer Players.” Sahin, a biology and computer science major and data science minor, was also awarded the PRiSM Trainee Travel Grant funded by the NIH to cover the cost of attendance.

Founded in 2012, PRiSM is dedicated to leading interdisciplinary research, education and advancement in pediatric and adolescent sports medicine. This year’s 10th annual meeting will “provide high-quality dissemination in the basic sciences, prevention, diagnosis, treatment and technical advances in the multi-disciplinary areas of sports medicine for children and adolescents.” The 2023 PRiSM Conference will be held from Feb. 2-4 in Denver, Colorado.

“As an aspiring researcher, participating in this year’s PRiSM Conference for the first time will provide me with a platform to introduce my research, stay up to date with recent literature and developments in the field, learn from sports medicine’s most renowned research leaders in-person, and discuss their work with them,” Sahin said.

Sahin’s research study stems from a hypothesis originally developed while playing high school soccer that more one-footed soccer players, as opposed to ambipedal players, may exhibit an elevated risk of injury. At the time, Sahin was interning with Dr. Sophia Ulman at the Movement Science Lab (MSL) at Scottish Rite for Children in Frisco, Texas. This internship focused on biomechanical data analysis, particularly regarding adolescent athletes, and allowed Sahin to explore his hypothesis. He conducted a literature review and found that the potential relationship between foot-limb dominance and injury risk was unexplored and lacked an index for the quantification of dominance.

The purpose of Sahin’s study is to fill this gap in research by developing a quantifiable metric for foot-limb dominance and examining its effects on neuromuscular asymmetry among a pediatric soccer player population.

Sahin continues to work remotely with Ulman and the Movement Science Lab. On campus, Sahin is a cellist in the University Orchestra and an active member of the medical engineering team for the W&L Engineering World Health chapter.

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