News

CMI Featured on the NC State Homepage

The Comparative Medicine Institute (CMI) was recently featured on NC State’s homepage. Our very own Matt and Lauryn were featured by name (photo toward the end), and eagle-eyed readers may notice the back of Lewis’s head or Stephanie Cone’s nose in some of the other photos. We’re so thrilled to be part of this amazing group and work with such brilliant and dedicated scientists.

Read the whole article here.

You can learn more about the CMI here.

Today’s NC State homepage feature (click to enlarge)

Zack Awarded NSF Fellowship

Zack Davis, former TORL undergrad and current graduate student, was awarded a very prestigious NIH Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP). We’re so proud of him! Due to social distancing, we had to celebrate remotely.

First photo: Waiting for him to join the Zoom Meeting

Second photo: Springing into action to congratulate him!  (Zack is bottom right in this one)

Partnership with Exploris

Last year we worked with Annah and Robert’s fourth grade students at Exploris Elementary in downtown Raleigh (read about that here). We had a great time and learned a ton from the students, so when Annah reached out again we jumped at the chance! We once again focused on 3D printing and design, with the students doing an engineering design project designed to address one of five “grand challenges”. We visited their classroom and told them about 3D printing, what it can do, and how we use it in the lab. We also helped them brainstorm some ideas for their challenge and gave them feedback on their prototypes. Today, we got to see the results of their efforts during final pitch presentations. What an amazing group of students and truly inspirational teachers!

See Steph’s tweet about our initial visit here.

And Annah’s tweet about the pitch presentations here.

The students welcomed us with artwork:

The winners with their 3D printed trophies:

Final Two Papers from Stephanie’s PhD Work Published

She wrote a great twitter thread explaining the research and its significance:

Stephanie Cone Wins Stryker/ORS Women’s Research Fellowship

Stephanie Cone, TORL alumnus and the first TORL graduate, was recently awarded the Stryker/ORS Women’s Research Fellowship.  Per the website: The Stryker/ORS Women’s Research Fellowship promotes women in science by providing an opportunity for a female ORS member who is a recent PhD in science or engineering to conduct research in the field of orthopaedic technology. The Fellowship provides one year of supportfor eligible applicants who are within five years of obtaining PhD degrees and are full-time post-doctoral fellows conducting orthopaedic research with an experienced research advisor.

Congratulations!

TORL Goes to Star Wars

Our (more or less) annual lab holiday tradition is to go see whatever Star Wars movie is being released in December. This year it was the final installment in the Skywalker Saga, Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker. We all enjoyed the movie, we think (some of us are still processing).

Matt to Receive Y.C. Fung Young Investigator Award

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has awarded Matt the prestigious YC Fung Young Investigator Award “for leadership in musculoskeletal bioengineering and translations mechanobiology to improve human health”. The award will formally be presented at the Summer Biomechanics, Bioengineering and Biotransport conference in Colorado in June.

 

You can see the BME announcement here (https://www.bme.unc.edu/bme-assistant-professor-matt-fisher-receives-the-2020-asme-y-c-fung-early-career-award/)

 

More info about the award is here (https://www.asme.org/about-asme/honors-awards/achievement-awards/y-c-fung-young-investigator-award)

SciMatch Visit with Exploris Middle

Our lab loves doing SciMatch (formerly Invite a Scientist) as part of the North Carolina Science Festival. We have participated since 2016, and loved all the teachers and students that we’ve met. This year, we headed out to Exploris Middle School in Raleigh on Wednesday to spend time with the 6th graders and show them some our awesome science. A great time was had by all, including us and we can’t wait until next year!  Check out our tweet about it, or see photos below.

2019-2020 Abrams Scholars

Congratulations to AJ, Joella, and Aituaje, who were both selected as Abrams scholars for the 2019-2020 academic year.

AJ will be continuing on his independent research project:

Comparison of grafts for adolescent ACL reconstruction: Adolescent anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries are becoming more common in recent years due to an increase in adolescents’ sports participation. The type of ACL reconstruction surgery that is appropriate for each injury depends on multiple variables, including age, severity of damage, and the surgeon’s preference. One common treatment approach involves removing the damaged ACL and replacing it with a surgical graft. Comparison studies have been conducted for adult populations receiving surgical grafts, however there is a lack of available data adolescent populations. This project involves developing a testing protocol to measure viscoelastic properties of grafts in a physiological environment. Once a protocol has been established, a graft comparison study using a growing porcine model will be conducted. The study will test the mechanical differences between various grafts at different ages (for example, hamstring tendons, bone-patella tendon-bone, etc.) to better choose which graft may be most appropriate in the adolescent population.

Aituaje will continue working with Zack on a project that she began over the summer:

Effect of material and 3D printing parameters on replicating the structure and mechanical properties of the meniscus: The meniscus is a load-bearing tissue in the knee with complex geometry. Treatment of injuries to the meniscus often lack patient-specific size matching. Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) is a 3D printing technique that melts a thermoplastic then extrudes it in the form of small fibers in a layer by layer manner. This allows us to create complex shapes controlled by computer-guided code. This project aims to apply FDM as a tool to replicate patient-specific geometries, assessed from MRI scans, while matching the meniscus’s mechanical properties by varying materials and printing parameters. The student will perform tensile and compressive testing on 3D printed samples to analyze their mechanical properties.

And Joella will continue working with Danielle:

Characterizing the microstructure of the ACL throughout skeletal growth: 
The anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) connects the femur to the tibia, and functions as a major stabilizer in the knee joint. Injury and surgical reconstruction of the ACL in pediatric patients are rapidly increasing, but these surgeries result in 4-6 times higher secondary injury rates compared to these surgeries in adults. Further, females are at a much higher risk of ACL tear than males during adolescence but not childhood or adulthood. The ligament is largely hypocellular and is composed mainly of aligned collagen, but little data is available regarding its specific microstructure throughout growth. This project will aim to histologically examine the microstructural properties of the ACL in males and females throughout skeletal growth. Results from this project will help us understand what might contribute to the disparity in injury rates between males and females throughout growth. Further, this data can be applied to help inform the development of sex- and age-specific tissue engineered ligaments.

About the Abrams Scholars Program:

Abrams Scholars are outstanding BME undergraduate students who are selected to receive a stipend to conduct hands-on laboratory research projects. These projects are conceived and designed by the students with the guidance of a faculty mentor. The Abrams Scholar program honors C. Frank Abrams, Jr., a BME and BAE emeritus faculty member. Dr. Abrams led the development of the first courses in Biomedical Engineering at NC State and was instrumental in the founding of NC State’s BME Department, the creation of the joint UNC-CH/NC State graduate program, and ultimately the launch of the UNC-CH/NC State Joint BME Department. He was the Joint Department’s first senior design instructor as well as the first Director of Graduate Studies.

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!