This year we continued our partnership with Athens Drive, leading an activity at their week-long spinal muscle atrophy-focused STEM camp. We once again taught them about spinal curvature using pool noodles and resistance bands to model SMA.
Our word cloud this year didn’t have quite as many different responses as last year, but we still enjoyed hearing what the kids thought ‘Biomechanics’ meant.
All in all, we’re calling it a success!
Congratulations to recent OML graduates: Brooke, Josh, Marisa, Isabel, Jason, and our most recent PhD: Dr. Sandra Stangeland-Molo. We didn’t get photos of everyone, unfortunately, but we did get some. We’re so proud of everyone!
We once again hosted our annual National Biomechanics Day event on April 9. We opted not to partner with MSEN Day this year and go back to our ‘classic’ format instead. This meant that rather than having an hour, we had a whole 2.5 hours with the students! We had 30 high school students from the nearby Wake Young Men’s Leadership Academy come to EB3. They rotated through 8 different labs’ activities: 5 in the lab itself and 3 in a common space. We liked being able to bring the students into the labs and also having more time with them to show them some of the cool research that we do.
Our student visitors:
Some of the amazing volunteers:
We had five students present at the 2025 National Council of Undergraduate Research conference in early April in Pittsburgh, PA. All of them talked about their work on the BPBI project.
The annual Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) conference was pretty nearby this year in Baltimore. Our department had a whopping 46 presenters this year, including a few from OML.
Recently, we saw a very cool X/Twitter post [link] featuring a Gantt chart of people that had been in the PI’s lab over the years. We, of course, decided that we needed one too! As of the end of summer 2024, here’s the history of OML (click to open larger image in new tab).
Steph put the chart together in Excel and explained how she she did in her tweet.
We had three students present at this summer’s Symposium. They all presented on their research related to the BPBI project. Great job everyone!
Congratulations to Gabby for receiving the Witherspoon Graduate Fellowship! You can read the department announcement, below, or check it out here.
The Witherspoon Graduate Fellowship honors Dr. Augustus M. Witherspoon, who received his Ph.D. from NC State in 1971. He was the university’s second Black doctoral graduate and first Black professor. Dr. Witherspoon also served as Assistant Dean, Associate Dean of the Graduate School and Associate Provost of the Office of African American Affairs. In 1992, the NC State Board of Trustees awarded him a citation of appreciation for his service to the university.
Funded by an endowment to North Carolina State University, this esteemed one-year award honors individuals dedicated to supporting Black communities within and beyond the NC State campus.
The selection committee, comprised of representatives from the Black Alumni Society and the Graduate School, reviewed 12 nominations and chose seven graduate students for this distinction. As part of the fellowship, Brim will receive a monetary stipend to support her future endeavors.
This recognition highlights Brim’s accomplishments and commitment to community support, underscoring the impactful contributions made by NC State’s graduate students.
This year we continued the partnership that we started last year with the STEM summer camp at Athens Drive. Last year we thought our activity went very well, so we decided to repeat it this year.
To begin, we asked the students ‘What is biomechanics?’ They had some pretty creative answers.
We then connected our lab’s biomechanics focus to spinal muscle atrophy (one focus of the camp) by looking at scoliosis, and how variations in spinal muscle strength can affect curvature. We once again used a pool noodle to represent the spine and exercise bands as ‘muscles’.
Congratulations to our lab members who graduate last weekend. Katie, Brian, Carter, and Claire all received their bachelor degrees. Sandra and Jason also received their PhDs. Sandra was event selected to give a speech at the department graduation ceremony! We will miss them all, but we’re very proud.
