Kevin Evans, PhD: Well, thank you for this opportunity to talk about my research and also to invite graduate students to work in our laboratory. My name is Dr. Kevin Evans, and I have a PhD in gerontology. And I have been in clinical practice here at the Medical Center for more than 20 years. So the focus of my research really is about imaging. And of course, I want to see if I can move our research from structural, at the tissue level of imaging, more toward the cellular area, which is a rather hot topic right now in the field. The lab that I have established is at the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, and our website, I think, is being displayed. [Screen displaying Laboratory for Investigatory Imaging website, specifically displaying image of laboratory faculty And we've named our lab the Laboratory for Investigatory Imaging. The reason for that name is because we are looking at all forms of imaging. Probably the most common imaging modalities that you're familiar with are MRI and CAT scan, but we also spent a great deal of our time looking at ultrasound. And our new projects are surrounding the use of contrast media to look at vascular perfusion in human tissue, which will also take us to the cellular level. So, contrast agents are microbubbles of gas that are injected into the patient, and it allows us to follow the bloodstream down to that cellular level. We have a great deal of grant funding currently, and that has been very helpful to advance some of the research questions that we're interested in. And so I want to direct your attention to our five-year plan, which is listed on our website. The five-year plan is the faculty will be working within our laboratory to find both ergonomic solutions for workers, because we also have this separate area of inquiry that we're interested in. We find that many of healthcare workers are becoming injured on the job, and that leads to a lot of acute injury at the tissue level. So this defines the area of tissue imaging that we're very interested in, which is the acute injury surrounding workers who are getting musculoskeletal disorders. And then we're also interested in using this cutting-edge imaging, which would be our movement towards cellular, to look at both the upper extremity and also figure out how those puzzle pieces fit with clinical testing and other objective measurements through surveys. And all of this is going to help us better understand what's going on for workers, specifically who are being injured in the workplace, and also this will have translational potential for clinical practice for patients at the bedside. [Text on screen 5 Year Plan for Scientific Progress The faculty working within The Laboratory for Investigatory Imaging is united in finding ergonomic solutions for workers at risk for Work-related Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs). Cutting edge imaging for the upper extremity, objective measurements, and clinical testing will be used to impact the growing incidence of MSDs in the workplace.] So we have several projects that are going on right now, and we really embrace the idea that the best way to get for sure funding, as well as high-quality publications, is to start with looking at the basic science. And so in that respect, we have spent a good bit of time looking at animal model research. We have done some research with small monkeys and also with mouse models. And so that is where we begin a lot of our work. So if that's an area that you have interest in or would like to have more experience, we certainly would be open to helping people gain that, because it's not as easy as it might sound. [Text on screen Current Research Currently, our primary area of research is the utilization of sonography to advance the 5 year plan. The laboratory is actively working and supporting 4 OSU IRB approved projects. Our primary project is the collection of and analyzing musculoskeletal sonographic images. We are fortunate to be increasing our understanding of the use of contrast enhanced ultrasound techniques and role it might play in amplifying perfusion in muscles, tendons, and nerves. We are also grateful to be working in close collaboration with Drs. Carolyn Sommerich and John Buford who are making remarkable advances in our understanding of CTS at an experimental level.] There's a number of facilities here on campus that provide very specific help with imaging in the animal model. Besides our own ultrasound equipment that we own in our laboratory, we also have access to MRI unit in Wiseman Hall. So we have both MR imaging for animals as well as ultrasound imaging, and we also have a great relationship with the Wright Center for imaging, which is over on Kinnear Road. And that's a fantastic facility, and it has all sorts of imaging there, and both human and animals can share that particular facility. So, we have great access to a number of high-quality imaging modalities. And again, it's all about working from an animal model and then translating it to the human model. We also spend a lot of time in the Department of Anatomy because we have found that for tissue imaging, we like to stage a lot of our studies with cadavers, because that helps us to better understand what tissue imaging looks like, and it also helps us to advance our protocols so that we don't waste any time when we do recruit humans. So, if you can picture this idea of getting the basic science fleshed out with an animal model and then translating to anatomy, where we come up with high-quality protocols for capturing the data and then getting IRB approval to move towards clinical trials. That is the trajectory of what the laboratory is doing. So, I'd like to spend just a little bit of time talking about what we would see a graduate student, a PhD candidate, doing in our lab. We, of course, are writing grants all the time, and so I think grantsmanship is a skill that is not second nature; it certainly wasn't for me. And so, we involve all of our graduate students in some portion of grant writing as kind of putting the whole package together. It starts with a budget, and it also starts with a great research question. So, those are both ends of the spectrum, and we involve our students in all aspects of grant writing. In addition to that, we also spent a fair amount of time going to conferences to better understand some of the cutting-edge research that our colleagues are doing. I'm very happy to say my last doctoral student is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, where he has also established an imaging laboratory. So, we do a lot of collaborative work with Dr. Rolle at USC, and he has different tools than we do. And so it's kind of a nice way of working bicoastally with another laboratory, and I think that's a unique experience that a doctoral student could have with us. So, just to sum this all up, we really look forward to having high-quality doctoral students who are interested in getting more information about how to do imaging surrounding a research question that looks at both the cellular investigation of imaging with contrast media, vascular perfusion, moving to using cadavers, and then also moving to clinical trials with humans. And we currently are IRB-approved for five projects. I'm a co-PI for an NIH grant through the NIOSH funding agency, and we also have a current R01 that's under review with NIOSH. So, there is a significant amount of funding in our laboratory. And again, it's all for answering those research questions for the projects we have running and also to gather pilot data for new projects that we're interested in. So I encourage you to look at our website for more information, and you certainly could contact me. My email is: Evans.36@osu.edu, and I'm on email quite a lot throughout the day and the night, so please feel free to contact me if you need further information. Thank you.