[2] As a young man in Australia, Stuart trained to compete with the Australian team in the British Commonwealth Games as a high jumper.
It was at MSU that Stuart developed his interest and expertise in academe (including exposure to experimental neuroscience; his first venture involved testing the effects of fatigue on human reaction time); blossomed in public speaking (MSU sent him state-wide to promulgate interest in its foreign student program) and leadership (he co-ran a dormitory of 500 undergraduate and graduate students); met and subsequently married (1957) an American undergraduate (see below).
Rather, with the guidance of an outstanding MSU teacher and mentor, Professor W. Duane Collings (1914–81), he opted to pursue a PhD in physiology at UCLA, where he began his studies in January 1957.
[3] Immediately prior, however, he returned briefly to Australia where, after failing to make the Australian track team, he designed and had built the scoreboards used for over a dozen sports (e.g., basketball, boxing, gymnastics, swimming) at the Melbourne Olympic Games in November 1956.
Stuart's lab has made exceptional contributions to the study of locomotion, and the need to integrate findings from experiments on invertebrates, non-mammalian vertebrates, mammalian tetrapods, non-human primates, and humans.