"Speaker 1- My name is Brian Knarr.
Speaker 2- Can you tell me a little bit about your job and what it entails?
Speaker 1- Sure.
I'm a researcher here at Star, and I work with muscular skeletal modeling and rehabilitation.
So I spend a good amount of my time doing computer modeling and working with post stroke
individuals, but I also work with several other types of individuals that come through
here.
So, one of the main things we do is focus on stroke research and rehabilitation for
individuals that have experienced a stroke.
Personally I've worked mainly with muscular skeletal modeling, which involves building
computer simulations of these individuals during gait, that involves predicting how
their muscles actually work and actually being used during walking.
That can differ quite a bit from how normal healthy walking can look.
Mechanical engineering was always an interest for me in high school, and as I went through
undergrad I was exposed to sort of bio-medical and bio-mechanical engineering field and I
found that was very interesting application of a lot of the same principles as mechanical
engineering.
Speaker 2- What inspired you to get into this specific field?
Speaker 1- Sure.
As I said, a lot of my background was interested in engineering; while I was in undergraduate
I had a few professors that were involved in this field of bio-medical engineering.
I remember one of them told me an interesting prospective on the field, saying that there
is still so much we don't know about the human body and how it works, and there is so much
potential to learn in this field.
It really struck me as an exciting opportunity.
Speaker 2- Tell us pretty specifically what you do on a day to day basis.
Speaker 1- Typical day for me involves collaboration and kind of individual work at a computer.
I do a lot of computer coding, a lot integration of engineering science into computer programs;
building these muscular skeletal models of human gait.
As well as working with a lot of physical therapy focused work, working with the clinic
trying to integrate the models and the principles that we highlight with our code, that isn't
able to be done in real world situations, and how we can integrate that into the clinic
to improve the rehabilitation of subjects.
My grandfather had a series of mini strokes that effected his ability to get around and
function cognitively.
That happens in a lot of families, you often see a lot of issues with the elderly that
pop up that we try to tackle, that we try to improve their lives any way we can.
I think any time you run into a difficulty or challenge in what you are currently doing,
something else can often look more appealing; or easier at the time.
That's when you have to rely on your support structure of your friends and family; to remind
yourself of why am I doing this, why am I having to confront this challenge rather than
taking the easier way out.
Looking at the overall goal of what you can accomplish in the future can often help that
as well.
So, a lot of the modeling and computer work that I do focuses on building these models
for a specific individual.
How can we parameterize this model, how can we construct this model so it best reflects
a single individual and not necessarily a group whole.
By doing this we can look at the results of a single individual on how a rehabilitation
may effect them, and prescribe a certain type of rehabilitation that would best benefit
that individual.
I think that success can be measured in a lot of different ways.
Whether it's moving on from high school to college, to graduate program to a PHD, but
there's also successes in every day, in every little challenge that you accomplish and everything
you overcome.
Personally, there has been a lot of times where figuring out problems in code, or figuring
out a way to best represent a type of rehabilitation that we do in a computer in a model.
Anytime we overcome that, or figure out a better way to do something, that is a success
that I think needs to be counted along the way.
Success is measured by are we helping people.
If anything I can do or anything this field can do to improve the way that someone lives
their life, that absolutely the biggest success we can have.
The biggest thing I can say if you like a challenge, and if you like to help people
and you find it rewarding when people appreciate what you do for them, then the medical field
is an incredible source of that."