Who: I’m from Denver, Colorado and moved here to Salt Lake last June! In my free time, I enjoy socializing with friends at coffee shops and making music!
My scientific/engineering interests: I am in the biomedical engineering program here at the U because I am very passionate about helping others. I have always been interested in medicine but decided that I did not want to attend medical school, so biomedical engineering was the perfect place for me!
Academic goals: During my undergraduate career, I hope to continue my research in my lab and perhaps get published.
Career goals: I am undecided as to whether I would like to pursue a graduate degree or start working in industry after graduation, so I will just see where the wind takes me! Either way, I aim to help as many people as I possibly can.
According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, approximately 35 out of every 100,000 infants will experience abusive head trauma (AHT) within their first year of life. Of these AHT cases, up to 35% will be fatal (Joyce 2019). Distinguishing between accidental and inflicted trauma is challenging as infants are unable to describe the events surrounding their injuries. Recently, we developed a finite element model to predict skull fracture patterns from accidental head impact in infants. This software shows promising agreement with available literature, but impact angle is a critical variable to the pattern and is not measured or reported in previous studies. The objective of my project was to develop an experimental setup to evaluate porcine skull fracture patterns with accurate measurements of impact angle. Such an experiment will provide more precise validation of the software, and improve our ability to distinguish between accidental and inflicted injury in infants.