News

We’ve Published Two More Papers!

We’ve been busy over the summer here in the TORL. We’ve recently had two papers published. One from our grad student, Stephanie C and Paul, and one that was a collaboration with members of Robert Mauck’s lab at UPenn (where Matt did his post-doc).

 

Check out the one from Stephanie and Paul (and Matt), called “Rise of the Pigs” here.  It’s a review of the use of a porcine model for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM) research.

 

The other paper, found here, focuses on subchondral bone remodeling following various types of injury and repair approaches.

Invite a Scientist: Lesson Plan

Back in March we participated in the Invite a Scientist program through the UNC Science Festival. We visited a 6th grade class at Apex Middle School. You can see our post about our visit here.

 

Since then, we put together a lesson plan that can be used by late middle school or high school science teachers to introduce their students to the ideas of material properties, tissue growth and function, and how we hope to use 3D printing in medicine in the future. It ties in to the Next Generation Science Standards in the areas of middle and high school life science (LS) and engineering, technology, and applications (ETS) (more specific connections can be found in the lesson plan).

 

If you’d like to use our lesson plan, you can view and download it here or below. Please send a quick email to Stephanie (sdteeter[at]ncsu.edu) and let us know what you think, whether you opt to use it or not!

 

Lesson Plan_Understanding Mechanical Properties to Improve Current Knee Injury Treatments

Stephanie Teeter wins Award for Excellence at University Level

Many congratulations are in order for Stephanie, who was one of 12 nominees selected for the University Award for Excellence, which is the highest honor a non-faculty member can receive! Despite stiff competition, the committee recognized her outstanding contributions to the community. Now she goes on to compete for the Governor’s Awards for Excellence. Winners will be announced late this summer.

Per the website: “The NC State University Awards for Excellence recognize the notable contributions that are above and beyond an employee’s normal job responsibilities. These meritorious achievements or accomplishments should be so singularly outstanding that special recognition is justified.”

See the official announcement here.

Stephanie pictured receiving her award, with University Chancellor Dr. Randy Woodsen and College of Engineering Executive Associate Dean Dr. John Gilligan.

ACL Orientation paper published in Journal of Orthopaedic Research

A paper from our lab’s research into orientation changes in the cruciate ligaments was recently published in the Journal for Orthopaedic Research.

 

The paper, first authored by Stephanie Cone, demonstrates that a pig model exhibits the same changes in the angles of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) in the knee relative to the tibial plateau throughout growth as results previously found in human female patients. This has important implications for better understanding pediatric knee growth and injuries going forward.

 

The article, titled “Orientation changes in the cruciate ligaments of the knee during skeletal growth: A porcine model” results from an ongoing collaboration with Dr. Jorge Piedrahita from the NC State Comparative Medicine Institute, Sean Simpson from the Department of Molecular Biomedical Sciences at NC State,  as well as Dr. Jeff Spang in the Department of Orthopeadics and Dr. Lynn Fordham from the Department of Radiology and at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. Funding was provided by the NCI Cancer Center, National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.

 

The NC State Bulletin also covered the research in a recent article.

Congratulations to our Graduates!

Congratulations to Hope and Stephanie, who are both graduating this weekend.
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Hope Piercy is graduating with her Bachelor’s of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering. After graduation, she will be working for Method Sense as a quality consultant.
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Stephanie Teeter is graduating with her Master’s of Education degree in Science Education. After graduation, she plans to continue her work in the lab and will begin a part-time PhD in Science Education in the fall at NC State.
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Congratulations to them, and everyone else graduating today!

Annual Mini Golf Competition

On Friday we held the second annual TORL mini golf extravaganza. Matt was the winner (again) and was handsomely rewarded with a mini glow-in-the-dark Death Star trophy. The loser had to have a Sno Cone flavor chosen by the winner. Matt bequeathed this honor to the runner up mini-golfer, Paul, who made Jay (our gracious loser) have a combination of orchid, spearmint, with a hint of citric acid for tartness. Note that orchid is so bad, that it has been described as “eating potpourri” and is not even on the menu. Special request only. Luckily Jay was a good sport about it. Though he tried to finish out of stubborn pride, he eventually yielded to his protesting taste buds about half way through.

The winner’s circle (of one):

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Jay going in for the first bite
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Smiling through the pain. What a sport!

TORL Represents at ORS

TORL has a strong showing at the Annual Meeting of the Orthopaedic Research Society this year.  The meeting was held in San Diego on March 19-22.

Stephanie Cone presented her poster “Age-Specific Function of the ACL Bundles During Skeletal Growth in the Porcine Model.”  Paul delivered a fantastic oral presentation entitled “Guiding Collagenous Matrix Organization by Varying Strand Spacing in 3D Printed Scaffolds.”  Paul’s talk was also a finalist for an award given by the Meniscus Section of ORS.  Great job Stephanie and Paul!

 

TORL Outreach Activities: Spring

TORL participated in several outreach activities this spring.

  • Invite-a-Scientist: The Invite-a-Scientist program is put on by the North Carolina Science Festival. It pairs scientists with local middle schools, where they spend the day teaching students about their research and why they chose to become a scientist. We went out to Apex Middle School to teach the kids a bit about biomedical engineering.

TORL Receives Pilot Funding for Musculoskeletal Simulation Research

TORL was awarded pilot project funding on musculoskeletal modeling through the National Center for Simulation in Rehabilitation Research (NCSRR).  The goal of the work is to develop and validate a new platform for modeling musculoskeletal growth and loading using a computational approach requiring joint simulation and finite element analysis.  The project also aims to develop software tools to link these computational programs.

The title of the project is “Integrated iterative musculoskeletal modeling to study growth and function” and represents an ongoing collaboration with Dr. Katherine Saul, an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at NC State.  Dr. Saul is director of the Movement Biomechanics Laboratory at NC State.  Dr. Saul and Dr. Fisher are co-PIs on the project. 

The announcement of the award can be found at the NCSRR website.