Congratulations to Sara Moshage who received a 2020 Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology Graduate Fellowship (see Beckman announcement here). Her research focuses on the benefits of physical activity on bone health. As most of us know that physical activity when young has life long benefits for bone strength in human athletes, however, it is difficult to know when the adaptation occurred and how much exercise is necessary. Understanding bone regulation during growth will allow us to identify critical components of structure or composition that are indicative bone quality. She will be using horses, who are natural athletes, as an animal model to answer these questions. The overall objective of her research is to evaluate markers of bone quality on multiple scales and develop a model to predict how exercise affects these markers. She will use a combination of imaging techniques, mechanical tests, and finite element models to build this model. A computational model of this type could be used to predict the effect of various interventions on bone properties in an effort to better inform proposed interventions.
Collaborators on this work are Prof. Mariana Kersh (Mechanical Engineering), Prof. Annette McCoy (Veterinary Medicine), and Prof. Rohit Bhargava (Bioengineering).
