"While I had difficulties adapting to the new culture, new language—basketball kept me moving forward."
Thirteen years ago, Elisa Ogawa couldn't speak, read, or write English. But she arrived in Dorchester with a passion.
Ogawa, then 15, had traveled from Japan to live with her aunt, with the dream of playing basketball in the U.S.
“My mom spoke to us in English but we spoke back in Japanese, so when I first got here, I understood what was going on, because I understood English, but I couldn’t speak back, and I couldn’t read or write,” said Ogawa, who was born in the U.S. before her family moved to Japan. “While I had difficulties adapting to the new culture, new language—basketball kept me moving forward.”
On May 30, the now 28-year-old will be earning her third degree from UMass Boston, all in exercise and health sciences, with a 4.0 GPA in her PhD coursework. Nine years ago, Ogawa transferred from the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, where she had a basketball scholarship, to her adopted hometown of Dorchester, and never left.
Because she was injured her senior season, she decided to redshirt, and played for the Beacons the first year as a master’s student. She says basketball – which she still plays during summers with her fellow UMass Boston alumni – is going to be a key component of her address during the graduate commencement ceremony. Ogawa was chosen to deliver the student address to an audience of more than 1,000 graduates and their families and friends.
“Be receptive to changes. Things might not pan out the way [you want them to] but it’s going to be OK. Just follow your passion,” Ogawa said.
Ogawa has transitioned from being a captain of the Beacons women’s basketball team and founding president of the EHS graduate student organization to a professor and coach at Quincy College, and to a different type of coach at the Boston VA. Ogawa started a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in March that has her doing research 75 percent of the time and working with older veterans the rest of the time.
“Part of it is working with them to make sure that they stay healthy and mobile. [It’s a] prehab approach rather than a rehab approach,” Ogawa said. “The clinical aspect of it – that is very new to me. Now I’m just making sure that they enjoy [exercising], and they want to continue. So that’s different and I like it.”
As an undergraduate, Ogawa volunteered for UMass Boston’s GoKids program, and in her three years teaching at Quincy College, half of the class she taught was about exercise with youth and half was about exercise with older adults. It was during her master’s program work that she transitioned to working with older adults. She also taught a course on exercise and aging to adults 50 and older in UMass Boston’s OLLI program. Between 2014 and 2017, Ogawa worked with Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director Tongjian You on the NIH-supported R21 study Effects of Tai Chi on Multisite Pain and Brain Functions in Older Adults, serving as study coordinator and exercise instructor.
“Through her hard work, we enrolled 54 older adults with chronic pain and at a risk of falling. Elisa was a vital member of our study team, and it would be impossible to enroll this number of subjects without her professionalism and dedication,” You said.
Ogawa has published seven peer-reviewed research papers and has several other papers that are under review or in preparation. For her dissertation, Ogawa collaborated with the Computer Science Department and created an exergame, which combined cognitive games – brain stimulus games—with exercise. She went to senior living communities and gave residents either an exercise program or an exergaming program, to see which, over an eight-week period, was better at preventing people from falling.
“Instead of clicking [with our fingers to answer questions] we used our body – like Tai Chi movements. So there’s physical work as your brain works,” Ogawa said. “Now I want to figure out why cognitive function is related to falls so that I can make a better intervention to prevent them from falling. So I’m not necessarily trying to create games now, but I’m on different projects trying to examine what’s causing what and what is the relationship between falls and cognitive decline and regular decline.”
When her post-doctoral fellowship ends, Ogawa sees herself as working at a medical center where she could do research as well as clinical work or teaching while doing research.
“I always wondered what life after basketball would be like and what I found was another passion: research,” she said.