"A person walks across the street and is hit by an automobile. The right tibia is fractured. The patient is taken to a trauma center where a team of orthopaedic surgeons put a rod inside the fractured bone so it can heal and support the patient's weight. Six months later the patient is back at work and leading a normal active life."

This scene is acted out every day in trauma centers throughout the world. People have fractured bones and fracture fixation devices are used to align the fragments which allows them to heal, and secondarily allow the patient to return to normal activity while the bone is healing. Our laboratory has been involved in the design and development of plates and rods for fracture fixation and external fixation devices for severely fractured long bones. The search for absorbable materials that could be used for fracture fixation devices is also an ongoing research interest. The advantage of an absorbable material is that a second surgical procedure for hardware removal would be eliminated. This is an extremely interesting area of research with new biomedical polymers being developed and tested on a regular basis. Collaborative efforts with industrial and academic scientists at other institutions are currently underway and include fabrication and testing of new polymeric and composite materials and cell culture and implantation studies.