Event Date
Richard L. Lieber
Chief Scientific Officer & Senior Vice President of Research, Shirley Ryan AbilityLab
Professor of Physiology, Biomedical Engineering and PM&R, Northwestern University.
Rick Lieber is a physiologist who earned his Ph.D. in Biophysics from U.C. Davis developing a theory of light diffraction that was applied to mechanical studies of single muscle cells. He joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego in 1985 where he spent the first 30+ years of his academic career, achieving the rank of Professor and Vice-Chair of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. He received the M.B.A. in 2013 and is currently Chief Scientific Officer and Senior Vice President at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and Professor of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University in Chicago, IL.
Dr. Lieber’s work is intentionally translational, applying basic scientific principles to help patients who have experienced spinal cord injury, stroke, musculoskeletal trauma or cerebral palsy. He has published over 350 articles in journals ranging from the very basic such as Biophysical Journal and The Journal of Cell Biology to clinical journals such as The Journal of Hand Surgery and Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research. Dr. Lieber’s research focuses on design and plasticity of skeletal muscle. Currently, he is developing state-of-the-art biological and biophysical approaches to understanding muscle contractures that result from cerebral palsy, stroke and spinal cord injury.
Intraoperative and Laboratory Studies of Skeletal Muscle Contractures
Skeletal muscle is a classic biological example of a structure-function relationship. We developed sterile intraoperative tools to study muscle microstructure during surgery and found dramatic alterations in the muscles from children with muscle contratures due to cerebral palsy (CP). This lecture will detail those studies as well as point to future approaches for nonsurgical correction of human muscle contractures.
Location: In-Person Format
- Activities and Recreation Center Ballroom
Registration:
- This event is free to attend and open to the public.
About the Series
The Paul Molé Memorial Lecture was created to recognize excellence in the study of exercise physiology by inviting notable researchers in the field to the UC Davis campus. Professor Molé studied how muscles function during exercise. The lectureship is designed to promote his multidisciplinary and collaborative vision, and to further highlight and support discoveries in exercise physiology.