UWM Professor Honored With Government’s Highest Award for Early Career Scientists and Engineers
MILWAUKEE – Brooke Slavens, Richard and Joanne Grigg Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UWM, was recently awarded the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. The award is highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their career.
She was nominated by the National Institutes of Health for her pioneering research on shoulder pain experienced by both pediatric and adult manual wheelchair users. In addition to wheelchair mobility, Slavens’ expertise includes upper extremity modeling and rehabilitation engineering.
Slavens is the second UWM faculty member honored with the early career award. Krista Lisdahl, professor of psychology, won the award in 2012.
A majority of people who use wheelchairs propel themselves manually rather than using a powered wheelchair. The biomechanics of shoulder and wrist pain in adult manual wheelchair users is well documented. But Slavens’ work is bringing new information to light on the understudied upper-extremity joint dynamics in children.
The work is revealing not only how using manual wheelchairs affects children’s joints, but also how upper-arm stress and the resulting pain unfolds over a lifetime.
Slavens discovered that adults who sustained spinal cord injuries as children report less shoulder pain than those injured in adulthood, even though they typically use wheelchairs for a longer time.
To investigate this, she is leveraging advanced software and ultrasound imaging to explore how propulsion patterns differ between children and adults and whether these differences explain the variation in shoulder pain.
The current rehabilitation guidelines for preserving the upper limb following spinal cord injury were established for adults and are often not effective. Slavens aims to develop tailored clinical guidelines for children while simultaneously refining the guidelines for adults based on her findings.
Among her findings from other studies are:
- Geared manual wheelchair wheels, which operate like gears on a bicycle, decrease the risk of user injury. The low-gear capability makes it less demanding on the user’s upper extremities.
- Significant differences in upper-extremity joint dynamics exist between the sexes during manual wheelchair propulsion in children.
- New knowledge that can help the development of diagnostic criteria and treatment strategies for Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a rare disease that renders children susceptible to constant joint pain and fatigue.
Slavens has been on the scientific staff at Shriners Children’s Hospital in Chicago since 2009 and has done collaborative research with both the Clement J. Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health – and specifically the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development; the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research; and the VA Rehabilitation Research & Development Service.
About UWM
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has an ambitious mission as both a top-tier research university and an access institution, striving to ensure that students have equitable opportunities to earn a college degree. UWM educates a diverse student body of more than 23,000 students from 88 countries. About 39% of its undergraduates are first-generation college students. Its unique and top-rated programs include Wisconsin’s only accredited schools of architecture and public health, the only North American school dedicated solely to freshwater sciences and a film program ranked among the top 50 in the world. It has the largest and top-rated online education program in Wisconsin. UW-Milwaukee partners with leading companies to conduct joint research, promote entrepreneurship, provide student internships and serve as an economic engine for southeastern Wisconsin. The Princeton Review named UW-Milwaukee a 2024 “Best Midwestern” university based on overall academic excellence and student reviews.
NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.
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