Big congratulations to TBL members that were big winners at the end of the Spring 2018 semester.
First, MS candidate Sara Moshage, was a finalist and ultimate winner of the campus wide image of research competition. Sara put together a great story about her research on our first foal that we have monitored to understand how equine bone grows and develops in early life. For over a year, Sara used motion capture data to measure how Illini Cyclone (the foal) walks and has paired this with longitudinal CT data to understand how his bones have been developing to respond to his increases in mass. Sara hopes to identify whether there is a time period during development when bone seems to be most adaptive to changes in mechanical loading, to help prime their bones for a career in racing and minimize fracture risk. Her work, along with collaborators John Polk and Annette McCoy, has helped the lab to acquire funding from the UIUC CARF program to enroll two new foals as well as begin an exercise intervention program.
The lab had two posters and an oral presentation at the UIUC Undergraduate Research Symposium. What amazing work from dedicated and motivated students!
Sam Goldsmith – senior in MechSE – presented at the Health and Wellness portion of the symposium. He has been working on the development of artificial ligaments using textiles. Building on previous work from Kate MacDuff in which we tested several elastomeric materials – Sam turned to textiles (yarns) as a bio-inspired material. Sam’s presentation won first place! Jae Lee, junior in MechSE, presented his development an apparatus for mechanically loading ligaments within an MRI machine. This work will allow us to use tractography-based measurements to track ligament fibers. Finally, Ida Ang, senior in BioE, presented results from a study of finite-element models used to optimize ligament strain energy functions to experimental test data. Congratulations to all three!
