 I'm from the University of California in San Francisco, and my work is on skeletal mechanobiology, and we're trying to understand how the physical forces that our body encounters when we're exercising, whether it's skiing or bike riding, and all the other activities that are happening up here in Vail, how do those help keep our skeleton healthy, and how are those disrupted in diseases? And if we can understand those processes, then maybe we can intervene and stop the progression of disease earlier or help promote regeneration. How did you get into that? I mean, that seems pretty specialized. I was just fascinated. I remember seeing a picture in graduate school of the cells in bone on the screen of a medical school lecture that I was just attending so I could learn how to teach it in the next year, and just seeing the picture of those cells made me have a thousand questions, and that was so long ago, but actually that's what I'm studying today, and we now know that the cells that I was looking at way back when are the cells that are responsible for sensing mechanical forces and converting it into biological action to keep our skeleton healthy. I think one of the pieces of news a lot of people have heard is how important exercise is for our skeletal health and for bone health, and we're precisely trying to understand how does that work. So that is one of the areas of relevance, and certainly all of our work supports that entirely, that everything that we're doing with exercise continues to support our health. And we think that by exercise and a healthy person, or maybe we can help cells feel like they're exercising in a joint injury so that if they do have an injury, we can change what they're experiencing and help them promote a healthy signal instead of a damaged signal. Cells encounter physical forces in so many different ways. Cells can feel stretch, they can feel how soft or stiff something is, just like a mattress, the Goldilocks principle, is it soft or too soft or too stiff or just right. They can sense fluid flow across the cells, and we're trying another part of my lab is trying to understand how does a cell tell the difference between all of these different kinds of forces just the way that we can, and we don't know the answer to that, but it's an exciting question. We take advantage of cell culture experiments where we're looking at cells in dishes, and we have, I have really smart bioengineers working with me who are figuring out how to mimic all of those signals in a cell culture environment. So I have one student who's making a flow chamber using microfluidics to flow cells, and then we look at them using this really high-tech microscopy to understand how it works and a variety of others. But we also use animal models and apply loads to a mouse as if it's jumping on a trampoline on one leg, and then we can see what's happening in the one leg that's getting the mechanical load relative to the other leg that isn't. And by studying that, we can really begin to understand the molecular underpinnings of how a cell can experience mechanical load. Do you ever feel frustration doing what you're doing because I don't think people understand how research really works and how long it takes to really fully understand or comprehend what is really going on? That's a very real part of research, and especially when I was a trainee, and it's something I'm very mindful of the people who are working in my lab now, that it's a very real part of your day-to-day life of coming in and needing to face up against that that obstacle and push and push and try and try and try again. And there's a really great analogy that somebody described called the cloud where you're doing all of these experiments and you're getting data, but you don't really understand what it means. And it's like being in an airplane in a cloud, and it's just all foggy. And then, but suddenly the airplane comes right out of the cloud, and all of a sudden there's clarity. And so I remember those experiences as a student, and I try to remind my students who are in the middle of the cloud, like, don't worry, you're going to get to the other side. If you're collecting good data and we're doing the right experiments, and you're doing it rigorously and well, then you will get to that other side and we'll get some answers. One of the sessions that I thought was most inspiring was the session on senescence and aging. So, I think one of the best parts of a meeting, and especially a meeting like this one, is bringing people together who are from different disciplines. So, I often get to hear about work in bone or cartilage, but I don't often get to hear about work in the brain or the heart on senescence. And so somebody who's working on a very different tissue, but on something that's fundamental and relevant to what I'm studying, is incredibly helpful in giving us new ideas and insights that we can take advantage of. And one other thing that I personally really appreciate about this meeting, that's different from any meeting I go to, is the involvement of people who are not scientifically trained. So, having members of the lay public come and participate in the sessions and mingle with us at the coffee breaks or the cocktail hour or the poster sessions, and ask me, well, you know, I got this procedure and it works great, so why isn't anyone talking about it? I think it's really important for scientists to hear from people who are receiving what we're trying to do on the front line. It keeps me motivated and those are the stories I take back to the people in my lab.