Paralympic skier studies the neurological condition that changed her life

Sydney Peterson was five when she first fell in love with cross-country skiing. At 13, her body began betraying her—involuntary muscle contractions in her left arm and leg, the result of faulty signals misfiring in her brain. The diagnosis came at 19: dystonia, a movement disorder with no cure.

She kept skiing anyway.

Today, Peterson competes for the U.S. Paralympic team with one pole and a custom ankle brace, her left side partially paralyzed but functional enough to race. In 2022 alone, she won three medals at the World Para Snow Sports Championships and three more at the Beijing Paralympics, including gold as part of the mixed relay team. But her real ambition lives in a different kind of lab.

The Scientist and the Athlete

While training for international competitions, Peterson is also pursuing her PhD in neuroscience at the University of Utah, specifically studying movement disorders like her own. In her lab, she and her colleagues test FDA-approved medications on fruit flies to determine which drugs might help treat genetic movement disorders. The work is painstaking and indirect—fruit flies as stand-ins for human neurology—but it's also deeply personal. "A lot of the drugs we test here, I've taken them before," she told NPR.

This overlap isn't coincidental. Peterson's condition sparked her interest in neuroscience, but she was deliberate about not studying dystonia itself. "I wouldn't want to do that. That would be too deep," she said. Instead, she chose to study the broader landscape of movement disorders, giving herself intellectual distance while staying close enough to understand her own body.

What makes Peterson's path unusual isn't just that she's balancing elite athletics with doctoral research—it's that she's using one to deepen the other. Learning about her condition didn't make her despair; it made her curious. "Once you start learning more about the brain, it's really hard to not want to go deeper," she explained. The brain surgery she had during her undergraduate years slowed her condition's progression, but it also showed her something else: treatment works. Research matters. The scientists doing this work are solving real problems for real people.

Building a Life Beyond Sport

Peterson entered college with full function in all four limbs. By her sophomore year, she was watching her arm and leg slowly lose strength. That kind of progressive loss creates a particular psychological burden—you can't plan ahead because your body keeps changing the terms. "Living with dystonia can feel like your body's just constantly betraying you," she said, "and it feels like you can never put a plan in place because then you have to constantly change that plan."

Yet she's built two plans anyway: one on the slopes, one in the lab. The second one matters more for her future. Elite athletic careers have expiration dates, especially for athletes managing progressive conditions. But research doesn't. By pursuing neuroscience alongside her Paralympic career, Peterson isn't just hedging her bets—she's creating a path where her lived experience as a patient becomes expertise as a scientist.

There's a quiet pragmatism in her choice. She's not trying to cure herself through her research or prove anything to the condition that changed her life. She's simply refusing to let dystonia define the boundaries of what she can do. She'll keep skiing as long as her body allows. She'll keep running experiments on fruit flies and testing hypotheses about movement disorders. And somewhere in that work—maybe not in her own lab, maybe in someone else's—treatments will improve for people like her.

"If you're passionate about something, don't avoid it just because it seems challenging," Peterson said. "Anything you want to pursue is going to be challenging. You might as well go for it." The remarkable part isn't that she's competing at the highest level despite a progressive neurological condition. It's that she's also building a career that will outlast the condition itself.