Biomechanical industry researchers tour Virginia Tech labs

We first got in touch with Virginia Tech through Alyssa Rametta, who is helping us build out our internship program and hoping to connect students with the Joe Gibbs Human Performance Institute. Our morning started with an information session. We visited VTTI, we got to learn about the smart roads, actually go on a drive around the smart roads, which was really exciting and fun to see all the environments they can create. After VTTI, we went over to the Center for Injury Biomechanics and we got to see some of their testing facilities for crash tests. We got introduced to some of their crash test dummies, which was fun. Then we toured the helmet lab and we got to see all of the different testing rigs to test different types of helmets for different sports applications. We got to end the day with the Granata lab and Robin Queen shared some of the research that they're doing in a wide range of applications in biomechanics and looking at ACL injuries and sports performance. So it was really exciting to see their part of the biomechanics lab. Coming here made me more excited to get students into the lab. There's a lot of room for interdisciplinary work, and even if their background is not machine learning or deep learning like mine is, just the pure drive and curiosity from them, I think we can turn into knowledge and application. As an undergrad, I haven't gotten to experience much of the research facilities at my school. This is kind of a first time for me coming here and seeing the labs at Virginia Tech. And they really exceeded my expectations of the depth of the data that they're going into, the things they're thinking of studying. That wouldn't even cross my mind. The goal of the Human Performance Institute is to bring in engineers who are really passionate and excited to apply what they've learned to sports performance. I think the strong foundation of the engineering program here makes the students here well suited to do an internship. So that's why we're trying to recruit from them. So I was really excited to have that connection and get to know some of the students today, share what we're working on, and hopefully find some opportunities in the future to bring students into the lab.