oliver o'reilly
Name: Oliver M. O'Reilly
Project Investigator
Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley
Website
Email: oreilly at newton point berkeley point edu

jeffrey lotz
Name: Jeffrey C. Lotz
Project Investigator
Professor, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at UCSF
Website
Email: jlotz at itsa point ucsf point edu

jenni buckley
Name: Jenni M. Buckley
Director of Operations, Biomechanical Testing Division
Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at UCSF
Website
Email:buckleyj at orthosurg point ucsf point edu
Professional Torso Thawer

melodie metzger
Name: Melodie Metzger
UC Berkeley/UCSF Ph.D. Student, Bioengineering
Email: melodie point metzger at gmail point com
Mad cyclist

nur adila faruk senan
Name: Nur Adila Faruk Senan
UC Berkeley Ph.D. Student, Mechanical Engineering (Dynamics)
Website
Email: adilafaruk at berkeley point edu
Professional nutcase...(that's what she said!)
In her own words: "I am working on modeling the intervertebral disk as a stiffness matrix as well as quantifying the amount of error involved due to the experimental technique employed. My work has (to the best of my knowledge) no impact on global warming (I bike to and from the lab and live on second-hand/freeloaded stuff) ... although, the amount of time I spend working is inversely proportional to the amount of free stuff I manage to 'score' from Career Fairs.
Hopes and aspirations that I happen to have with regards to the project - that I will somehow manage to figure out how to get LaTeX to compile eps figures. Once I get that down, my life will be complete ... and I will be able to devote my time to my true calling - testing out different flavors of chewing gum."

david moody
Name: David A. Moody
UC Berkeley Ph.D. Student (Controls)
Research Interest: Orthopaedic Biomechanics
Undergrad: B.S. Mechanical Engineering at The Ohio State University
Home Town: Columbus, Ohio
Email: dmoody at me point berkeley point edu
David is working on developing a physiologic test protocol that simulates in vivo loads during common activities for the lumbar region. The goal of his work is to understand how total disc replacement devices affect the mechanics of the spine at the adjacent levels.

daniel peters
Name: Daniel M. Peters
UC Berkeley Ph.D. Student (Dynamics)
Email: dmpeters at berkeley point edu
Daniel is working on a continuous elastic rod model of the spine, which can be easily reduced to two dimensions and analyzed using Euler's elastica. Through this approach, results can be obtained about buckling in the sagittal plane, where the spine has an intrinsic curvature that makes the spine more resistant to buckling. Once these results have been produced in the absence of musculature, singular muscle forces will gradually be added to the model under the assumption that they considerably increase the buckling load of the spine.

miguel christophy
Name: Miguel Christophy
B.S., Mechanical Engineering, UC Berkeley
M.S. Candidate, Mechanical Engineering, UC Berkeley
Email: christophy at gmail point com
Miguel is using SIMM and OpenSim 2.0 (simtk.org) to create an experimentally valid, and physiologically detailed open-source musculoskeletal model of the lumbar spine to determine static forces/moments and forward dynamics. The goal here is to create a universal model that can be used and further developed by the research community as more information on the topic is discovered.