McKay Orthopaedic Research Laboratory

Description of Research Expertise

I am currently a Research Scientist in the Translational Musculoskeletal Research Center at the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center, with a co-appointment as a Research Assistant Professor in the McKay Orthopaedic Research Laboratory in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania. My general research interests include cross-talk between the intervertebral disc and adjacent spinal tissues (including the vertebral bone and facet joints) during degeneration, regenerative therapeutics for the treatment of disc degeneration, and novel non-invasive imaging modalities for orthoapedic tissues. As a graduate student, I was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to pursue my thesis research on enhancing intervertebral disc nutrition as a potential therapeutic strategy for the treatment of disc degeneration. My thesis work with Dr. Eric Ledet illustrated for the first time that convective transport induced by mechanical loading can enhance the uptake and clearance of small molecules in the healthy and degenerative disc. This work was awarded the 2015 ISSLS Prize for Lumbar Spine Research in Bioengineering, the most prestigious award in the field of spine research. My postdoctoral research with Dr. Robert Mauck at the University of Pennsylvania furthered my interests in disc regeneration and was focused on evaluating novel tissue engineered therapeutics for disc degeneration in translational animal models. This work was supported by a VA Career Development Award (CDA-1), and our publication on the long-term in vivo evaluation of a tissue engineered disc replacement in Science Translational Medicine was featured by numerous news outlets including the Philadelphia Inquirer and Popular Science. In the fall of 2019, I was awarded a VA RR&D CDA-2 to study the contribution of vertebral endplate remodeling and altered disc nutrition on the progression of disc degeneration, and the role of disc nutrition in the non-operative treatment of patients with back pain.