Helpful Links

Navigate OHIO

Connect With Us

College of Arts and Sciences
Wilson Administrative, second floor, 204
740-593-0053

Eric Muth

Eric Muth, portrait
Professor, Vice President for Research and Creative Activity
Grosvenor Hall, Suite 202
Psychology
vprca@ohio.edu
(740) 593-0371
Vice President of Research and Creative Activity

Education

Ph.D. 1997       Psychology, Penn State University, Experimental/Psychophysiological emphasis

M.S. 1993         Psychology,  Penn State University, Experimental/Psychophysiological emphasis

B.A. 1991         Psychology major with Math and Biology minors, magna cum laude, Hartwick College

Biography

Dr. Eric Muth has served as the Vice President for Research and Creative Activity at Ohio University since July 2025.  He previously served for 4.5 years as the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.  

He began his research administration career at Clemson University as an Associate Dean for Research. Prior to helping others grow their research acumen and programs, Eric led a successful research team for over 25 years as a Navy scientist and professor. Eric is trained as an Experimental Psychologist and has experience post-degree leading a wide variety of research and development projects in both the laboratory and the field. He has performed data collection aboard ship, in aircraft, and in virtual environments.  Eric has been associated with over 7 million dollars of funded research and 100 publications, with the last portion of his career working on translational research in the area of mobile health technologies.

Eric’s graduate training was in Gastrointestinal Psychophysiology.  He completed his dissertation at The Pennsylvania State University Hershey Medical Center.  His dissertation and early publications were related to functional gastrointestinal disorders.  From August 2008-2009, Eric spent the year on sabbatical in Germany, funded on a Humboldt Research Fellowship working at the Universität Tübingen in the Psychosomatic Medicine Department. There he continued working on projects associated with functional gastrointestinal disorders and obesity. In 2019, Eric was accepted as a member of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research.  

In addition to his behavioral medicine work, Eric is an internationally known expert in the area of motion sickness.  His work over the years in this area focused on understanding the causes, symptoms, physiology and prevention of motion sickness with specific attention on user experience and performance while wearing head-mounted displays. 
As a research administrator Eric helps others pursue their passion to find their discovery.

Research Interests

  • Stress in high workload environments, and how it affects physiology and performance
  • Understanding the causes, symptoms, physiology and prevention of motion sickness, with particular emphasis on head-mounted displays
  • Developing and testing wearable mobile health technologies

Courses Taught

  • Health Psychology (graduate and undergraduate level)
  • Introductory Experimental Psychology/Statistics (undergraduate level)
  • Psychophysiology (graduate and undergraduate level)
  • Professional Practice in Psychology (graduate level) 

Partial list of Research Grants

  • 2021                 National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences     $490.8K capacity building grant sub-awardee to UNC Chapel Hill North Carolina Translational and Contingency Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute (N.C. A&T PI)
  • 2020                 National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences    $233.2K capacity building grant sub-awardee to UNC Chapel Hill North Carolina Translational and Contingency Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute (N.C. A&T PI)
  • 2019                 Soar Technologies – US Department of Defense     $113.7K to develop a spatial disorientation training system (PI)
  • 2018                 Soar Technologies – US Department of Defense     $16K to develop a spatial disorientation training system (PI)
  • 2017                 National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R01)     $505K to improve wrist-tracking measures of eating activity monitoring (co-I)
  • 2016                 National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R01)     $562.6K to improve wrist-tracking measures of eating activity monitoring (co-I)

Partial list of Publications

  • Chou T, Hoover AW, Goldstein SP, Greco-Henderson D, Martin CK, Raynor HA, Muth ER & Thomas JG (2024). An explanation for the accuracy of sensor-based measures of energy intake: Amount of food consumed matters more than dietary composition. Appetite, 194, 107176. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2023.107176.
  • Beadle SC, Muth ER, & Pagano CC (2021). Using head-mounted displays to examine adaptation and calibration under varying perturbations. Displays, 66, 101985. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.displa.2020.101985.
  • Williams D, Muth E, Thayer J, Chelimsky T & Chelimsky G (2021).  Does maladaptive cardiovagal modulation extend to gastric modulation in women with chronic pelvis pain?  Neurourology and Urodynamics, 39, 193-200.  DOI: 10.1002/nau.24532.
  • Turner-McGrievy GM, Crimarco A, Wilcox S, Boutté A, Hutto BE, Muth ER & Hoover A (2020). The role of self-efficacy and information processing in weight loss during an mHealth behavioral intervention. Digital Health, 6, 1-7.
  • Sharma S, Jasper P, Muth E & Hoover A (2020). The impact of walking and resting on wrist motion for automated detection of meals. ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare, 1(4), 1-19.
  • Wilson ML, Beadle SC, Kinsella AJ, Mattfeld RS, Hoover AW & Muth ER (2020). Task performance in a head-mounted display: The impacts of varying latency. Displays, 61, DOI: 10.1016/j.displa.2019.101930
  • Turner-McGrievy GM, Dunn CG, Wilcox S, Boutté AK, Hutto B, Hoover A & Muth E (2019). Defining adherence to mobile dietary self-monitoring and assessing tracking over time: Tracking at least two eating occasions per day is best marker of adherence within two different mHealth randomized weight loss interventions. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 119(9), 1516-1524.
  • Salley JN, Hoover AW & Muth ER (2019). Between- and Within-Subjects Predictors of the Kilocalorie Content of Bites of Food. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 119(7), 1109-1117.
  • Boutté AK, Turner-McGrievy GM, Wilcox S, Hutto B, Muth E & Hoover A (2018). Comparing changes in diet quality between two technology-based diet tracking devices. Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science, Available online 29 September 2018, https://doi.org/10.1007/s41347-018-0075-1.
  • Mattfeld RS, Muth ER & Hoover A (2017).  Measuring the consumption of individual solid and liquid bites using a table-embedded scale during unrestricted eating.  IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 21(6), 1711-18.  DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2016.2632621Mattfeld RS, Muth ER & Hoover A (2017). A comparison of bite size and BMI in a cafeteria setting, Physiology & Behavior, 181, 38-42. Available online 8 September 2017, ISSN 0031-9384, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2017.09.002.
  • Turner-McGrievy GM, Wilcox S, Boutté A, Hutto BE, Singletary C, Muth ER, Hoover A (2017). The Dietary Intervention to Enhance Tracking with mobile (DIET Mobile) study: A six-month randomized weight loss trial. Obesity, 25(8), 1336-1342.  DOI: 10.1002/oby.21889. Available online 10 June 2017.
  • Turner-McGrievy GM, Boutté A, Crimarco A, Wilcox S, Hutto BE, Hoover A, Muth ER. Byte by Bite: Use of a mobile Bite Counter and weekly behavioral challenges to promote weight loss (2017). Smart Health 3-4, 20-6.  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.smhl.2017.03.004
  • Weimer K, Horing B, Muth ER, Scisco JL, Klosterhalfen S, Enck P (2017). Different disclosed probabilities to receive an antiemetic equally decrease subjective symptoms in an experimental placebo study: To be or not to be sure. Clinical Therapeutics 39(3), 487-501. DOI: 10.1016/j.clinthera.2016.11.022
  • Shen Y, Salley J, Muth E & Hoover A (2017).  Assessing the accuracy of a wrist motion tracking method for counting bites across demographic and food variables.  IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics 21(3), 599-606.  DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2016.2612580. 
  • Turner-McGrievy GM, Wilcox S, Kaczynski AT, Spruijt-Metz D, Hutto BE, Muth ER, Hoover A (2016). Crowdsourcing for self-monitoring: Using the Traffic Light Diet and crowdsourcing to provide dietary feedback. Digital Health,2, 1-7. DOI: 10.1177/2055207616657212.
  • Jasper PW, James MT, Hoover AW & Muth ER (2016). Effects of bite count feedback and goal setting on consumption in young adults. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 116, 1785-1793 DOI: 10.1016/j.jand.2016.05.004.
  • Salley JN, Hoover AW, Wilson ML and Muth ER (2016). Comparison between human and bite-based methods of estimating caloric intake.  J Acad Nutri Diet, 116, 1568-1577. DOI:10.1016/j.jand.2016.03.007
  • Horing B, Newsome ND, Enck P, Babu SV and Muth ER (2016). A virtual experimenter to increase standardization for the investigation of placebo effects.  BMC Medical Research Methodology, 16(84), DOI 10.1186/s12874-016-0185-4. 
  • Kinsella A, Mattfeld R, Muth E and Hoover A (2016).  Frequency, not amplitude, of latency affects subjective sickness in a head-mounted display.  Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance, 87 (7), 604 - 609.

Awards

  • 2018                 Outstanding Contribution to the Literature, Clemson University Department of Psychology
  • 2015                 Faculty Scholar, Clemson University School of Health Research
  • 2010                 Robert S. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Aviation Research, presented by the United States Aerospace Experimental Psychology Society
  • 2009                 College of Engineering and Science Collaboration Award, Co-recipient with Dr. Adam Hoover
  • 2008-09            Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship
  • 2006-08            Clemson University Board of Trustees Award for Faculty Excellence
  • 2005                 Foundations of Augmented Cognition Award.  Awarded by LCDR Dylan Schmorrow, Program Manager of the “Improving Warfighter Information Intake Under Stress” program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • 2004                 Clemson University College of Business and Behavioral Science Emerging Scholar Research Excellence Award (2003-2004)
  • 2000                 Navy Commendation Medal for meritorious service while serving as Research Aerospace Experimental Psychologist at the Naval Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory
  • 1999                 Young Investigators Award-for the scientific paper “The experience of vomiting during head movements in sustained hyper-gravity with negligible angular velocity” presented at the 7th International Workshop on Electrogastrography.
  • 1999                 Finalist in the 1999 Aerospace Medical Association, Space Medicine Branch Young Investigator Award Competition
  • 1998                 Navy Achievement Medal for the organization of a multi-laboratory research group, the Motion Sciences Consortium, and development of research guidance for the study of Motion Adaptation Syndrome over the next three years.

Patents

  • A. Hoover, E. Muth, Y. Dong and J. Scisco, “Device and Method for Detecting Eating Activities”, USA, Patent No. 9,685,097, filed June 2014, granted June 20, 2017
  • A. Hoover, E. Muth and Y. Dong, “Weight Control Device Using Bites Detection”, USA, Patent No. 8310368, filed January 2009, granted November 13, 2012

Panel Service

  • Army Soldier Systems Panel Review Board for the Army Research Laboratory (2003-07)
  • US Special Operations Command Strategic Operations Scientific Working Group (2004-05)

Professional Affiliations

  • Fellow of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine (elected 2019)
  • Associate Fellow of the Aerospace Medical Association (member since 1997)
  • Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (member since 2002)