News

Stephanie Cone’s Last Day

We recently dedicated a lab meeting to celebrating Stephanie and Paul and their accomplishments. We’re so proud of the lab’s very first PhD students!

We started with a review of the 2+ year-long study that they’ve been conducting: A retrospective of Paul’s man-bun.

Matt presented them with gifts wrapped in their very first posters (or the earliest we could find):

Personalized jerseys! (Size youth extra small, for for display rather than wearing). Matt also had all of their lab mates sign a photo mat that went in the frame.

Congratulations to our Graduates!

Graduation 2019 was an exciting day for the lab. We graduated our first two Ph.D students: Stephanie and Paul. We also had three undergrads graduate this year: Emily, who joined our lab four years ago as a freshman, as well as Alex and Raghad, who joined us last summer.

 

Stephanie will be going on to a post-doc in at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Emily is going on to grad school at the University of Delaware. Alex and Raghad have both gotten great jobs in industry here in RTP.

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations graduates!

 

 

Fourth Annual Mini Golf Competition (aka we’re getting tired of this Matt!)

In a shocking turn of events, Matt won at mini golf once again, and made sure to rub in his 4-peat. You’re the best at mini golf, we get it, SHEESH. He was bequeathed the 2019 mini golf trophy, which he will lord over the rest of us for at least a few months.

 

In a new twist, we had a tie for last place – Paul and Zack get joint custody of the much coveted losers trophy. Great job guys!

 

Matt adds to his trophy collection

 

 

 

They were clearly thrilled to be sharing last place

 

Novozymes SciMatch (formerly Invite a Scientist) visit

We once again visited Ms. Baumgarten’s class at Apex Middle School. Unlike last time, Ms Baumgarten is now teaching 8th grade science, which means they know about cells/tissues, so we decided to make them honorary doctors and brainstorm how to treat some knee injuries. (we think) they had a great time and we know we did!

 

See Steph’s tweet here and below:

 

TORL Participates in National Biomechanics Day

We joined forces with many other labs in the College of Engineering to once again put on an amazing National Biomechanics Day! We had about 150 students from around the triangle come to learn about engineering, biomechanics, and why NC State (and BME especially) is awesome. Check out some photos below.

Emily and Danielle model tissue growth with expanding sponges
Zack shows some visitors how we use the 3D printer as part of our research
Zack shows some visitors how we use the 3D printer as part of our research
Stephanie C and Danielle show some students how we use 3D imaging to assess knee injuries.

Outreach with Exploris Elementary

Late last year, we were contacted by a local teacher, Annah Riedel, at Exploris Elementary School. She met us at SciREN and wanted to pair up to teach her fourth graders a bit about 3D printing and introduce them to the Engineering Design Process. First, they came to us out at the vet school and we showed them three different approaches to 3D printing. Then, they were each given a challenge to be solved by designing something and drafting a prototype to 3D print in TinkerCad. We met with them a few times to give design feedback, then picked a winner from each group to actually print.

 

Everyone had a great time (at least we hope) and everyone learned a lot, especially us! Thanks so much Annah for reaching out. You can read her blog post about it here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Holidays!

We took a break during the BPC holiday party to take this delightful photo of (some of) us standing in front of a Christmas tree, located in front of a mural with some Raleigh highlights (the PNC Arena and the Jim Graham Building at the fairgrounds). May your holidays be as bright as the lights on the tree and the fireworks on the wall!