I am a principal investigator at the Center for Advanced Orthopedic Studies at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. My research area is human spine biomechanics.

My first main research area focuses on the effect of metastatic neoplasms, aging, and trauma on the structure, function, and, ultimately, the spinal joint’s failure. This work has direct implications for advancing current prognostic protocols for the risk of pathologic vertebral failures in patients with metastatic disease of the spine and for the development of biomechanically-based imaging protocols for predicting this risk. This work forms a part of a new Image-based NIH funded study in cancer patients.

The second research area focuses on developing MR imaging protocols to interrogate the effect of age and degenerative disease on the structure and mechanical function of the human intervertebral disc. Most of my work has been on MR diffusion (apparent and lately DTI) to directly visualize the ordered collagen fibers’ spatial distribution and orientation in the annulus and nucleus within an intact human disc joint. I am to apply this information in computational codes for the prediction of disc mechanics using clinical MR imaging.

However, I am not an imaging person! I would very much appreciate collaboration in this area. Ron