Caitlyn Collins

Virginia Tech

Dr. Caitlyn Collins is an Assistant Professor in the Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics department at Virginia Tech, VA, USA. She earned her B.S. (2011) in Biomedical Engineering and her M.S. (2012) and PhD (2016) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From 2016 to 2018, she was a Whitaker International Postdoctoral Scholar in the Institute for Lightweight Design and Structural Biomechanics at TU Wien, Vienna, Austria. She then joined the Institute for Biomechanics at ETH Zürich as a MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow in 2019. Now, she leads a team of researchers in Hard Tissue Biomechanics and Computational Mechanobioloy. Her lab group integrates non-invasive imaging methods with experimental and computational mechanics to develop clinically applicable tools for monitoring bone integrity, fracture risk, and fracture healing in patients. Specifically, her lab has created several image processing pipelines for quantitative, high-throughput assessment of changes in in vivo bone structural, material and mechanical properties at the organ and tissue scale. Through this, her lab aims to better understand and model how the mechanobiological pathways in bone modulate its structure and physiology from cell to organ scale, and how diseases and treatments perturb this system.