Stephen Brown

• Human Health and Nutritional Sciences

• Exercise science and biomechanics
• Human health
• Mechanisms of disease

• adaptation
• Biomechanics
• function
• Human performance
• injury
• Lifestyle interventions to promote health
• low back
• Low back pain
• lumbar
• movement.
• pain
• rehabilitation
• remodeling
• skeletal muscle
• Spine

Our research is designed to understand:
1) The causes and consequences of acute and chronic low back pain.
2) How the low back functions normally, how it becomes injured, and how it adapts to injury/pain.
3) The role of muscle in protecting and rehabilitating the back from injury.

Our research is dedicated to understanding mechanisms that dictate healthy function of the human spine, and ultimately the causes and consequences of low back injury and pain. To do this we study the mechanics and physiology of the lumbar spine and its musculature. We use both human and animal models to understand different aspects of how spine movement is achieved and what "normal" movement looks like, the role of muscle in producing this movement and stabilizing the spine, and how the spine and muscle both adapt to injury and how they can be rehabilitated from injury.

Electromyography, kinematics (motion capture), kinetics, ultrasound, muscle mechanical testing, muscle contractile testing, in vitro muscle preparations, tissue mechanical testing, biomechanical modeling, muscle modeling, histology.

Electromyography, passive and active motion capture, force plate, force transducers, ultrasound, muscle single fibre mechanical testing systems, animal whole muscle activation and mechanical testing systems, soft tissue mechanical testing systems.

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