Callie's Project Page

Who:  My name is Callie Eppich and I'm from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Throughout high school, I was a ballerina, and I still try to dance whenever possible, between work and my academic responsibilities. You can always find me socializing with others.

My scientific/engineering interests:  Being a dancer led me to sustain 3 ankle injuries within the period of a year. As part of my healing process, I went to physical therapy and relied on some of my professors to learn more details about how my body was healing.  Through this experience, I fell in love with biomechanics and the engineering behind it.

Academic goals:  I am a biomedical engineering major and I hope to specialize in biomechanics.

Career goals:  My long term goal is to reduce the impact of debilitating injuries in ankles for athletes.  I would like to spend time working and learning in other areas of the biomedical engineering, like industry, research, and innovation to best prepare myself to developing  products that will support wellness and/or heal athletes who have an injury.

Ankle sprains are one of the most common injuries amongst athletes and these injuries never heal 100%.  Learning how to prevent these injuries is essential.  Fatigue has been proven to contribute to injuries in dancers so this study will determine where fatigue causes alignment to shift, potentially causing an injury.  This study aims to analyze the biomechanical effects of fatigue in the ankle during a relevé. This aids in finding the biomechanical point where fatigue causes alignment to shift and is no longer productive to improvement but lends itself to injury.   Force plates will be used to measure the ground reaction forces during the relevé and synchronization of the movement.  This synchronization will also function as a piece of alignment and will be collected using motion capture technology as well.  The data will serve as a base point for determining proper amounts of repetition within a period of time for dancers.  This preliminary modeling gives indication for where fatigue will cause the alignment shift and bring focus to our analysis of the motion capture data.

The Biomechanics of Fatigue in a Relevé Download The Biomechanics of Fatigue in a Relevé