Doctor and alumna lectures on medical research performed

Dr. Cynthia Rebar, a former professor in the science department at Edinboro University, introduced Dr. Carmen Quatman in Wiley 107 on April 19. Rebar began the lecture by addressing the credentials of Quatman, who serves as an orthopedic trauma surgeon at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

“Her interests include muscle skeletal injury prevention and surgical outcomes across the aging spectrum. Dr. Quatman’s research projects have resulted in 45 published manuscripts and over 60 presentations in professional meetings. She has also been an investigator on a nationally-funded NIH (National Institutes of Health) grant, $2.5 million, evaluating knee injury biomechanics,” said Rebar.

Quatman completed her M.D. Ph.D. program at the Toledo College of Medicine, however her career in the medical field began at Edinboro where she completed her bachelor’s degree in biology and pre-med. Quatman graduated in 2002. 

“Dr. Quatman has also received numerous and prestigious awards for her research. Dr. Quatman’s educational and professional experiences are very impressive, including her work at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Orthopedic Surgery Residency at the Ohio State University.”

Quatman then transitioned into her speech on leveraging technology to impact surgical patients as Rebar guided the audience’s attention in her direction.

“For those of you who don’t know me very well, I have a little bit of a flaw [and] it’s called shining object syndrome. I love to go after everything. I am so curious, and I think it has driven me. The hard part is when you get into your real career, [then] they actually make you accountable for those string of thoughts, and if you want to get promoted, you have to tie them together. I wasn’t quite sure how to sell that as I was moving up to be in NIH when I applied for grants, so this talk gave me a little bit of clarity on that too,” she said.

Quatman then spoke of ACL injuries, fragility fractures and operating room traffic, and the importance of integrating technology into modern medicine. When speaking of her work in 2008, Quatman underlined the ambiguity of ACL and MCL injuries and how studying those particular injuries were difficult to discern from one another.

“We had a really interesting journey in how to study this. One of the major ways to study biomechanics is bringing people into a laboratory and watch how they move in space,” said Quatman as she presented a visual aid through the auditorium’s projector.

Video analysis with the incorporation of computer modules to create injury simulations are used to give feedback on these types of injuries, a method which Quatman said took her 34 studies to figure out.

“We were trying to describe how to study this from a multimode perspective, so we had to give it a term because it wasn’t out there, so we created a word named sim. It is now published and people actually cite it,” said Quatman.

The Edinboro graduate provided more examples regarding her work and concluded the speech with a Q&A among students and faculty. 

Rick Chernicky can be reached at eupnews.spectator@gmail.com.

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