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.

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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. 

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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.

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We had three students present at this summer’s Symposium. They all presented on their research related to the BPBI project. Great job everyone!

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Congratulations to Gabby for receiving the Witherspoon Graduate Fellowship! You can read the department announcement, below, or check it out here.

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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.

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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’.

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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.

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This year, six of our amazing undergrads were awarded funding through the Office of Undergraduate Research and presented at the annual symposium. Katie and Brooke gave talks about their work with BPBI. Josh, Brian, and Jason presented posters on their BPBI work and Carter presented a poster about his work with the Bone-on-Chip project. We love seeing the amazing work that they’re doing!

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Several of our lab’s undergrads were selected to present their research at this year’s National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) Symposium. The event was in sunny southern California, and it looks like they had a great time!

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We once again partnered with the NC Math and Science Education Network (MSEN) to host our Biomechanics Day Event as part of their annual MSEN Day. This year, unlike last year, the event was held on Centennial Campus which meant that we could bring students to the labs in addition to our regular expo-type activities.

Until next year!

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