National Biomechanics Day

"I want you to hold your hand out straight and then circle." We've been participating in National Biomechanics Day since 2016, which was the first year this was done. It's a day across the US and now actually around the world where we bring, usually middle school or high school kids, to college campuses. Share with them kind of what it means to one, come to college, but two, what it means to do the cool work that we do in biomechanics. And so letting them to our labs and letting them ask questions to graduate students and faculty, and just kind of getting them hands on experience with what is the cutting edge research that we're all doing in that space. Biomechanics is really anything that looks at the way people move, whether that's an athlete running down the field, recovering from injury, patients who've had joint replacements or ACL tears. And then, you know, even people who are interested in looking at prosthetics, that ties in again with the work that we do in terms of understanding how someone walks. "Alright, Violet, there's something to the right if you turn it to the right." Our hope really is to get people interested in science generally and in STEM. For us, that's meeting the kids where they are, right? So we're here in Southwest Virginia, and we have the opportunity and the ability to bring them in, to show them again the work that's being done here on campus. It gives them the opportunity, right, to see that they're out running track, they're out playing in sport. How can they then take that and the passion they have for that and use that to think about what a future career would be. Whether that's, you know, in engineering, which is where we'd love to have them, or in kinesiology or in sports medicine or, you know, future orthopedic surgeons. All of these are things that we hope we can just inspire them to think a little bit differently about what their future may be.