Hi everyone. Welcome to Engineering Health and Introduction to Yoga and Physiology from NYU Tandon School of Engineering. My name is Alexandra Seidenstein, and I'm at faculty at NYU Tandon. I teach courses such as Genetics, Molecular Biology, and Cell Biology. My research focuses on epigenetics that is associated with disease, stress, and PTSD. I have here with me today Eddie Stern, a yoga teacher and Tommy Lee who also teaches at NYU Tandon. We're going to be exploring how yoga and physiology are connected. I've also taught yoga for about 15 years and practiced for longer than that. I studied for three years in India, and I've been able to also utilize the yoga in trainings for at-risk communities such as developmentally disabled, war veterans suffering from PTSD, and other populations in New York City and beyond. Eddie and I this year co-hosted the Yogan science conference together. It's been a true pleasure to try to bridge the gap between yoga and physiology and understanding how yoga can impact pathology. Eddie, can you tell us a little bit more about why you wanted to collaborate on this course? Sure Ale, thanks very much. So my name's Eddie Stern. I've been practicing yoga since 1987 and teaching since 1989. Over the years, I've been working to develop curriculums for health and wellness programming in public education as well as presence in other populations where there yoga would be very efficacious. I've also been engaged in scientific research in yoga for about the past 8-10 years. Through all of these different programs, we've seen how beneficial yoga is. Specifically, we've been seeing that the main thing that yoga is doing is affecting our physiological systems. It's not so much just muscles and bones in stretching and strengthening, but we're affecting some changes that is happening on a deep internal level. We wanted to investigate that a little bit more and perhaps further into the conversation about why yoga is still beneficial for people. Great, thank you. So happy to have you with us. Tommy, can you also tell us how this course influences your research and why you wanted to be part of it? I'm a senior lecturer at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. I've taught many courses throughout my years since 1995 from different schools here at the square or NYU at the square versus NYU School of Medicine, Bronx Lebanon's hospital system as well as [inaudible] university. My interest has always been neuromuscular physiology. So neuromuscular physiology puts together all of the systems between how the nervous system interacts with the muscular system which integrates very nicely with yoga. Some of our students at Tandon are undertaking yoga today. Therefore, I thought it was a good springboard into trying to express how these systems integrate itself and broaden the horizons of the students at Tandon. So they're always interested in my side projects really. So I like to study other than my basic discipline in neuromuscular physiology. I'd like to talk about the holistic medicine as well as astrobiology. Eddie, how would you define yoga for our audience? So yoga is a practice which gives energy, strength, and health to your body, balance to your nervous system, and evenness and steadiness to the mind. When we combine a practice where we have something that we do with the body, something we do with the breath and something we deal with our states of focused attention, we fully integrate our whole organism to come into the same place at the same time, which creates an overall feeling of well-being and presence. Sounds incredible. Tommy, can you tell us what physiology is? Physiology is the study of the body and therefore it is all about how each of the systems integrated again and how each system respects each other, what we call the homeostatic balance. Yoga is a great way of aligning this balance. So thank you both for embarking on this journey. I'm very excited to co-teach this course and help bridge yoga and physiology. In the next section, I'll go through how the modules work and what to expect out of the course.
