Awarded in 2006
Home Department: Mechanical Engineering, Radiology
Faculty Advisors: Scott Delp (Bioengineering, Mechanical Engineering), Garry Gold (Radiology), and Gary Beaupre (Mechanical Engineering)

Research Title: Determination of human articular cartilage functional condition using MRI, creep indentation testing and biochemistry

Research Description: The goal of Katy’s work was to better diagnose cartilage health, enabling early detection of diseases such as osteoarthritis. Currently, because cartilage disease cannot be diagnosed early, there is no metric of cartilage health to non-invasively evaluate restorative therapies. She combined magnetic resonance imaging techniques with mechanical testing of ex vivo cartilage to develop a correlation between imaging parameters and mechanical properties of cartilage. Several of the novel MRI techniques she used, e.g. sodium, T1rho, and bound pool fraction maps, were being developed at Stanford. She then translated the correlation between imaging parameters and mechanical properties to in vivo imaging of human patients.

WHERE IS SHE NOW?

Katy is the Project Leader in Quantitative MRI at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado.