On Jan. 3, 2014, an inaugural group of 20 OpenSim Fellows were chosen by the OpenSim team at Stanford University, with input from the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Center for Simulation in Rehabilitation Research (NCSRR). Dr. Reinbolt was selected as one of the OpenSims Fellows. “This honor, from the NCSRR, recognized my strong commitment to the OpenSim community and my background in biomechanical modeling and simulation,” Dr. Reinbolt said. The first group of OpenSim Fellows includes a broad range of expertise from distinguished researchers who are located around the world.
The OpenSim Fellows Program is a new initiative from the OpenSim project and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NCSRR. The goal of this program is to cultivate and engage a community of OpenSim experts who will collectively advance the field neuromusculoskeletal modeling and simulation. The OpenSim Fellows will conduct transformative biomechanics research and lead the charge in its translation to medicine, robotics, graphics, and other areas that enhance human health. The OpenSim Fellows will help grow and sustain the modeling and simulation community by 1) training the next generation of researchers; 2) encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration; 3) sharing models, data, and software; 4) advocating for model validation and 5) demonstrating simulation best practices.
OpenSim is a freely available, user extensible software system that allows users to develop models of musculoskeletal structures and create dynamic simulations of movement. It started from an initiative by the NIH to launch a set of National Centers for Biomedical Computation, and the first version of OpenSim was released on August 9, 2007. Specifically, OpenSim is a set of tools that enable users to develop models of musculoskeletal structures, build and refine simulations that utilize these models, and analyze the results of these simulations to gain insight into muscle function and other aspects of the musculoskeletal system. Dr. Reinbolt said the models built using OpenSim range in complexity from simple models used for educational purposes to subject specific models of humans with movement disorders. OpenSim has also been used to model animals, robots, and orthotics.
Dr. Reinbolt helped create the OpenSim software system as part of the OpenSim Project Team. First he was a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow (2006-2008) and later he served the team as an Engineering Research Associate (2008-2009) at Stanford University. Currently, there are 11 OpenSim team members at Stanford University, but throughout the past 10 years there have been 38 members of the project team who played a vital role in development of the OpenSim Software package.
To date, more than 14,000 unique users have downloaded the software, Dr. Reinbolt said. “OpenSim is used in hundreds of biomechanics laboratories around the world to study movement and the program has a community of software developers who continually contribute new features,” Dr. Reinbolt said. OpenSim caters to a variety of users from students who use it as a learning tool in biomedical engineering programs to researchers who perform cutting edge research in movement science, rehabilitation, and design orthotics. Congratulations Dr. Reinbolt on all your hard work!
For more information about OpenSim, visit http://opensim.stanford.edu/support/fellows.html