Two Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute scientists were featured as speakers at the 2015 TEDxVirginiaTech event. The theme of this year’s event, “Kaleidoscope,” was intended to captivate and inspire multidisciplinary and transformative ideas in line with the principles of TED, a nonprofit organization devoted to ideas worth spreading.

Sharon Ramey, a professor and distinguished research scholar at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, opened the event with a presentation on the impact of neurorehabilitation on the behavioral and brain development of children with cerebral palsy. Ramey spoke about her research findings in the field of implementation science, in which scientists seek to discover the most effective ways to rapidly translate scientific breakthroughs into practical use to realize full benefits for children and families.

Steven Poelzing, an associate professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, closed the first half of the evening by speaking about the potential of an effective and inexpensive method to prevent sudden cardiac death. Poelzing and his research team discovered the answers in the solutions – saline solutions, that is. They found that by adjusting the contents of the saline solution, they could reveal genetic cardiac diseases that would allow clinicians to take steps to prevent cardiac events before such an episode ever occurred.