Dr. Silvia Blemker | Co-Founder & CSO, Sprinkbok Analytics | Teaching & Advancing Biomedical Engineering & Muscle Analytics

Dr. Silvia Blemker is a distinguished professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia and co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Springbok Analytics. Silvia discusses her fascinating journey from a curious child who loved learning about anatomy to now leading groundbreaking research at the Multi-scale Muscle Mechanophysiology Lab. Learn how her innovative AI-driven muscle analytics technology is reshaping fields ranging from sports medicine to neuromuscular diseases. Silvia shares her passion for mentorship, the rewards of pushing scientific boundaries, and the thrill of solving complex challenges.

Guest links: https://www.springbokanalytics.com | http://www.uvam3lab.com

Charity supported: Sleep in Heavenly Peace

Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at theleadingdifference@velentium.com.

PRODUCTION CREDITS Host: Lindsey Dinneen Editing: Marketing Wise Producer: Velentium

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Episode 044 - Dr. Silvia Blemker

[00:00:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.

[00:00:09] Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.

[00:00:15] Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.

[00:00:28] Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.

[00:00:38] Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.

[00:00:42] Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of The Leading Difference podcast. I'm your host, Lindsey, and today I am very excited to introduce as my guest, Sylvia Blemker. Sylvia is the Robert Thompson Distinguished Professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia. She leads the Multi-scale Muscle Mechanophysiology Lab, which develops multi-skill computational and experimental techniques to study skeletal muscle biomechanics and physiology. The lab explores a range of applications including speech disorders, vision impairments, aging, muscular dystrophies, and human performance. New projects include developing models that incorporate for sex differences in musculoskeletal structure and simulating the effects of estrogen levels on muscle regeneration. Dr. Blemker is also Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Springbok Analytics, a company commercializing image based muscle analytics AI technology for many applications from muscle diseases to sports medicine.

All right. Well, welcome. And thank you so much for being here. I'm so delighted to talk to you today, Sylvia.

[00:01:55] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Thank you. I'm excited to be here also.

[00:01:58] Lindsey Dinneen: Awesome. Well, would you mind starting off by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and maybe what led you to medtech?

[00:02:08] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Sure. So I am born and raised in Lawrence, Kansas, a child of two immigrants who are from Argentina. And they're both professors. So from a very early age, I was exposed to the world of academia. My dad was a mathematician. My mom was a math person also. So, math and STEM was always from the get go part of my life and I knew it would be in the future.

And when I was trying to decide what to study as an undergraduate student, I learned of this field called biomedical engineering that was somewhat of a new discipline at that point. I started college in 1993. And I just thought it sounded perfect because I was really interested in medicine. I loved anatomy. I was one of those geeks that had anatomy parts, like models. I had an ear and I had an eyeball and a heart, all these different things. I just thought anatomy was really interesting and cool.

And I always thought being a doctor of some kind would be really cool because it would mix my interest in biology and anatomy with wanting to help people, but I don't think that was the right path for me, and it also wouldn't really leverage my interest in math and physics and stuff like that. So once I learned about biomedical engineering, I thought, "Wow, that sounds really perfect for me." And so it turned out it was because I did my undergrad in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University. I did my master's degree there, and then I went on to Stanford University. I got my PhD in mechanical engineering. But honestly, I would have been bioengineering, but back then there was no bioengineering department. So I was in mechanical engineering, but focused on biomechanical engineering.

And now I'm a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia. Been that since 2006. And I also, it's been about 10 years now, co founded a company that's in the medtech industry. It's called Springbok Analytics, and it's commercializing software to go from a rapid MRI scan to a fast assessment of muscle health and fitness.

[00:04:22] Lindsey Dinneen: Amazing. Well, thank you for providing some background and whatnot. That was so fun to hear about, you know, your interest in biology from even a young age and having all these models and that's just, that makes me smile. I love that.

[00:04:35] Dr. Silvia Blemker: like collecting bugs, too. That's weird.

[00:04:39] Lindsey Dinneen: Hey, you were interested in it. I love that. So I have so many questions, but the first thing that comes to mind: I love the name of your company and I'm curious why you chose Springbok.

[00:04:50] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Yeah, that is a great question. So, it was inspired by the springbok, the animal. It's very fast moving antelope that runs fast. It's very agile, jumps high. And the reason why we went that direction is our first market at Springbok was in human performance and elite athletes. And so we were using this technology to help athletes recover from injury and get to their maximum performance. So that's where that went. And, you know, honestly, when we first started it, we just kind of like dreamt that up and didn't know if it would stick, but now it has. And so here we are.

[00:05:32] Lindsey Dinneen: Excellent. So, yeah. So, okay. With the origin of that company, you brought something to market that has previously not existed in the way that you're doing very uniquely. Could you share a little bit more about what makes what you do so unique and how it's helped solve or covered a gap in the market, basically?

[00:05:54] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Sure. So I guess maybe while I answer that question, I'll tell you a little bit about where it came from in terms of the initial ideas. So I think that really answers your question too. So, so we're actually, it started as a research project in a combination of my lab and a few other collaborators at UVA. So started pure research funded by an organization that pro wanted to promote translational research. So research that starts on the very academic basic setting, but is translated to the outside world. You know, we do a lot of research that's very impactful, but it stays in the lab. And the idea is that some of it is ready to go out there.

So, having said that, the basic idea for the company actually really came out of some conversations I had with a collaborator, an orthopedic surgeon, who treats children that have cerebral palsy, in particular helps in terms of improving specific movement disorders that kids with cerebral palsy have. And so I've had a longstanding interest in understanding what's happening with muscles in these children because though it's an injury to the brain kind of right around birth which leads to these abnormal movement patterns, that ends up influencing their muscles and bones because muscles and bones grow based on the way you use them. And so this happening as a child means their muscles have a fair number of issues. And so I've been interested in that question, obviously, is if we know that, then we can help better improve mobility and treatments for these children.

And so, in my research, I've been making use of MRI a lot to study muscle, because that's a great way to do that in humans. If you're studying a mouse, which we do somewhat in my lab also, you can do a lot with a mouse muscle. But if you want to study human muscles, there's only so much you can do unless you're studying a cadaver, which obviously is not relevant. So, we use MRI and develop these fancy imaging techniques or interesting ways to get a bunch of information about the muscle from the MRI machine, MRI pictures, and do lots of different modeling and things like that.

So I was pretty young professor and I was developing new research ideas and this clinician said, his name is Dr. Abel said, "You know, all these interesting ideas about what you can learn about muscle from MRI is cool, but you know this is not something we could ever use in the clinic because the way that you're doing these scans is very hard. It's very research oriented. You're only studying one muscle, and really in cerebral palsy and impacts all the muscles of the in the body, but in particular for movement of the leg. And we don't have a way to, to quantify that or understand that. And that's what I really need to have in order to figure out how to treat these kids." 'Cuz ultimately he's has to do surgeries on a bunch of muscles and he has to make the decisions about which muscles to do surgeries on just by looking at the outside of the child and not really having a sense for what's going on at the muscle level.

So I was like, "Okay, well, maybe we'll try to solve that problem." Cause it seems like the problem I wanted to solve maybe isn't all that useful to you right now. So, that, that really was the basis for Springbok the initial idea was to develop a way to collect MRI rapidly and then transform that into a assessment of all the muscles of the lower extremity in particular for these kids because there's really no other way to get information at the muscle level.

We have ways to kind of assess how strong people are. But that's what we say in biomechanics, we call it at the joint level, you know, but like, for example, if you wanted to see how strong your knee is, you extend your knee for example, to get your quadriceps, but there's four quadriceps muscles. So if there's a weakness, which muscle is the one that is, you would have no idea what that was if from the outside. Same thing for all other joints. So, that's the idea is like to get to that detailed information and in this particular application it's very obvious why you need that because they're going to go in and do surgery on individual muscles. So they want to do the ones that actually need it.

And then, you know, the premise of where we went from there is that, the need to have information at the muscle level has a lot of different applications outside of that. And so that's sort of one thing led to another. And again, because we were funded by this grant agency called The Culture Foundation that wanted to promote translational research, one of the early pieces of feedback they gave us was the market that we was associated with the application we were first exploring in cerebral palsy was too small to start with. And there's too many barriers of entry in terms of being able to actually implement in practice.

So that's what led us to shift to other areas in particular. And in particular, elite sports because some of those barriers don't exist. The financial aspects are not nearly as challenging to start. And so it's actually a path I've heard of a lot of other healthtech or medtech companies to go start in sports and then veer into once they've gotten a bunch of data and validation, veer into the medical tech, and then that's precisely our path as well.

[00:11:12] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Excellent. Well, well, thank you for sharing more about that. That was such a great explanation specifically about the quadriceps. I really latched onto that because what an interesting problem, but then what a great solution that you all have developed. And, you know, I'm wondering, looking back before you started the company and really dove in, could you have anticipated that you were going to become this entrepreneur? And did you expect that this might be part of your path or was this kind of just a happy coincidence after the research developed?

[00:11:49] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Definitely did not expect it to be part of my path.

[00:11:52] Lindsey Dinneen: Okay.

[00:11:53] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Absolutely. By no means, my brother was the one that went, like he was an engineer too, and he worked for IBM and he became more of a business man. That's what I would call him. But, yeah, it was really, you know, a multitude of things, the encouragement. I had some really good, you know, co founders. Craig Meyer and Joe Hart were both colleagues and they were excited. It was sort of like at that point, it was like, "Well, I don't want to be the limiting factor here. We should all do this together, right?" Found some really fantastic people to help it get started because, of course, when you first start something, there is a lot of risk there.

And also, the three of us co founders had day jobs. We're still professors. And so we found a great actually grad of our program. To be our first CTO or first official employee. You really need to have that team around you. It's not just one person or two people, there's a lot that goes into this type of effort. And so I think without that, for sure, wouldn't have done it. And then one thing led to the other, I guess. It's definitely has pushed-- I can speak for myself-- out of my comfort zone a lot, you know, and it still does. But I think that's why I keep doing it also is I've learned a lot.

[00:13:10] Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. Yeah. Well, and I think that it brings different challenges than you're probably experiencing in the academic side of things, and that's its own challenge too. But I love the fact that, speaking with leaders such as yourself, you're always pushing yourself to the next thing. You're not really just happy being.

[00:13:29] Dr. Silvia Blemker: My husband might appreciate it more, but

[00:13:31] Lindsey Dinneen: Okay. Yes, this is fair. Yeah. Well, okay. So, so just briefly switching sides to the academic journey that you've taken. So can you speak a little bit more about the program that you are in and helping to continue to develop? And what are you excited about even just with the university as you continue to grow?

[00:13:56] Dr. Silvia Blemker: So I am a professor at heart. Right now I'm in a particularly interesting kind of stage of my career where I'm still a professor at UVA, but I'm actually part time professor and I'm also officially employed by Springbok. I'm a co founder, but I'm right now working as Chief Science Officer. So I do have two jobs.

[00:14:15] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Nice.

[00:14:17] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Yeah.

[00:14:18] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh.

[00:14:20] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Sons to o, but it's all good. It's, you know, it's nice full life, but so anyways, I have a research lab called, we call ourselves the Multiscale Muscle Mechanophysiology Lab. It's a mouthful. So we just call her, we say M3 Lab or M cubed. And we have PhD students, be it biomedical engineering, PhD students who are doing research and with in my lab going towards their PhD. I have postdoc, so students that have finished their PhD and continuing training for research in my lab, and then a whole bunch of undergraduate students who are getting involved in research for the first time. And the mentorship there that I do is ultimately, I think, honestly, what I love the most. And I joke with them because I now encourage all of my students to do internships while they're in their graduate program. I think it's incredibly valuable for a lot of different reasons that I could chat through. But I tell them, "You know, I never did that. And I did my internship in my late 40s. Fortunately, I realized that I made the right career choice, but I did it a little late. You should do it earlier."

[00:15:25] Lindsey Dinneen: Right. Oh, nice.

[00:15:28] Dr. Silvia Blemker: So anyways, I love my students all the way from ultimately in the lab, like exploring, you know, I talk a lot about with them, "You know, what we're doing is exploring the boundaries of knowledge together, pushing it and understanding where the boundaries are and figuring out how to push them in ways that can advance the world, really." And doing that with the student together and essentially I find myself like right behind them. I'm like, "Okay, keep going, teach me while you do it." I just find that, I just love doing that. It's very rewarding. And it's a real impact to be able to train other people to do this work. And there's the relationship aspect of it that is very valuable to me. So I just love teaching and hopefully inspiring new students to get involved in the kind of work I do, or help them figure out what they want to do. I think in the industry in the startup setting that mentorship is also a big part of it, but you know, it's just it's different.

So one of the big projects we have that is actually the cool thing is, it's empowered by the startup company. So there is a synergy there which I think is really cool. So we are in the lab creating the next generation versions of computer models of the body that account for differences between men and women, between males and females. So in the world of movement biomechanics, in addition to using MRI as a common tool, another way that we study human movement and to try to figure out what's happening on the inside of bodies is to use computer modeling where we have models that sort of help try to describe the person in as much detail as possible from the inside, their bones, joints, muscles, everything, how their muscles move, and combine that with measurements of motion from the outside and physics and use all that to figure out how the person, how their muscles are working.

There's a lots of different questions that you can answer once you have a model like that. The problem is that the model that everybody uses is based on data from like a 5'10 man. And then we scale it to fit anybody. So it doesn't even actually probably represent the 5'10 man, honestly. It's kind of an average. We're doing a big study where we collect MRI data of a large number of males and females, and we're doing a whole bunch of other measurements to allow the field to put that model aside and do a much better job at representing the population in particular, and accounting for the differences between male and female, because a lot of clinical problems, conditions, questions, issues that are the answer to them are different between male and females. And as a field, we don't really have ways to handle that. And I think that we need to do better than that.

So it's an interesting project because It's a very, it's, there's a lot of interesting technical thing problems that we're solving to do that, to do these modelings, models at scale and stuff like that. But it's also a bit of like a public service model or a project where we're answering these questions, but ultimately going to give these models to the community so that they can do their research better too.

[00:18:37] Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. It, you know, it continues to boggle my brain when I hear things like this, where it's like, "Yeah, we forgot to consider half the population." And I, you know, shouldn't make me laugh very much, I'm just very thankful, is really what I'm going to get to, of people like you who are going, "Wait a second, maybe this one thing that we've used all this time could be done more effectively and represent, like you said, just a better understanding of humans." So I...

[00:19:07] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Yeah. It's interesting. You know, I've wondered about this myself a lot, how do we come to be? And I think it's this interesting difference between thinking about the impact of what your science is versus how to do the science well, because as scientists were trained, take out all other extra variables so that you can answer the question, you can control for everything that's your questions not to do with so that you can answer your question or test your hypothesis. And so, if you add sex as a variable, that confounds your question. And then, if anything, it just means that you have to double your sample size, you have to account for that. And so to do it well, but maybe with less resources, it would make sense scientifically to go to one sex. So that's why that happens, right?

But then, if you're thinking about, "Well, yeah, but then I only answered that question for one sex," then you would do it differently. So I think that's where it comes from. Honestly, I don't think my predecessors were necessarily sexist or anything. I think they were doing things in the way that made sense scientifically by keeping things constant and wanting to have clean results. So that is what it is, but I think in a world where we're thinking more about the impact of what we do, we can't do that anymore.

[00:20:30] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, well, and I thank you for sharing that. I think that's a really great perspective and realizing that sometimes It's easy to get annoyed by something that when we don't understand maybe where it came from or why somebody chose the route they did and maybe there was a very just practical reason for it. And so I love that you shared that. Thank you for doing that.

[00:20:53] Dr. Silvia Blemker: But I will say that I have gotten annoyed though when you ask the question, like, "Why did you just do men?" Sometimes the answer is just, "Well, that's just how it's done." Not reasonable. I don't think that's, I don't think that's an...

[00:21:07] Lindsey Dinneen: A lazy answer.

[00:21:08] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:21:10] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. So, you know, either in your academic journey or perhaps in your entrepreneurial journey, are there any moments that stand out that really kind of affirm to you, "I am in the right industry, doing the right thing with my life?"

[00:21:29] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Oh, huh. That's an interesting question. I'll tell you when I know that I'm doing the right thing, when I'm excited to get up and do it

[00:21:39] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah.

[00:21:40] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Morning, I'm like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to work all this. This is exciting. I want to figure this out." That's usually what gets me up. Like my husband knows when I'm, we call it "locked in" because, you know, we have Gen Z kids, when I'm really trying to figure something out. And that, that really like gets me like figure something out that I know is important and impactful. I just love doing that. I think ultimately that's what I like and being creative and coming up with solutions and questions and stuff like that. That's not, I don't know if that's answering your question though.

[00:22:13] Lindsey Dinneen: It actually, well, it does though, because I mean, everyone answers that in different ways, but what I love is the fact that it's your daily life. That's a great answer to that question. It's, " I'm curious. I'm excited. I want to work with these students and solve these problems." And that's a dream.

[00:22:32] Dr. Silvia Blemker: That's what I, that's what gets me up in the morning. I mean, obviously not every day can be filled with these super intriguing things. There's a lot about a daily routine of any job that involves other things. And I try to learn to do those. Like one example of that for me was when I first started as a graduate student. As a scientist, a researcher, you have to present your results or give presentations a fair amount, whether it be to your lab group or to your thesis committee or in at a conference or a seminar. And then ultimately as a teacher, you have to do that all the time too.

And early on, I really did not like doing that. It was really painful for me. I was really anxious about it. I loved sitting there working stuff out on my computer. That I loved, I knew, but I did not think I could do any-- presenting was scary. The first time I had to go presented a conference, I literally memorized every single word of the presentation to the word, and even my friends, my graduate student friends who I shared a hotel room with, they could give my presentation. They literally could, but now I absolutely love presenting. It's something that I've come to really enjoy all aspects of it. So that's an example of maybe not everything initially seems like that's what I'm going to love doing, but sometimes you can surprise yourself.

[00:23:57] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Well, and I actually, to expand on that, I think the idea of you never know what your next sort of joyful surprise is going to be. So try the things and we'll discover that not everything is for you, but that's such great advice also for students, I feel like in particular, or maybe those young in their career is, "Just experiment, try it." You know, use it as this exciting time to just see. And yeah, you might even hate it the first couple of times, but you never know.

[00:24:27] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Yeah. Yeah. You never know. You never know. Absolutely.

[00:24:30] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Well, this is going to be an interesting one because I'm going to pivot the conversation and ask you something that I ask all my guests, but in your case, you are used to teaching and giving classes. So the question is, if you were to be offered a million dollars to teach a master class on anything you want, what would you choose to teach and why?

[00:24:52] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Oh, a million dollars. Oh, but I, like, I love teaching,

[00:25:03] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, I know. That's why I was like, oh man, this is gonna be interesting.

[00:25:07] Dr. Silvia Blemker: I think it was last year I was so proud of the undergraduate students. They give these awards to professors and I got the Lecturer of the Year award. So that was fun. And then I brought it home and my teenage son was like, "Oh yeah, yeah, that tracks. Mom's the lecturer of the year."

[00:25:26] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh!

[00:25:27] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Momly lectures. So anyways, it's hard to turn it off, but let's see, what would I give it about? I mean, it would probably be something about how muscles work 'cause I love talking about muscles. Honestly, like at the end of the day, that's now I'm kind of all in it. So I, I like talking about that stuff. Randomly about tennis too. I love tennis. I play tennis as a very low level tennis player, but I've become a tennis nerd. So if I had another job, I would love to be like a tennis announcer, but the science tennis announcer to talk about the physics and stuff like that, biomechanics. I would love that.

[00:26:05] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, I would love that. That would make it so much even more interesting to me because I'd go, "Oh my word, I had no idea that this was what's happening here." And yeah, that's cool. Excellent. Okay. Well, I like it. Well, how do you wish to be remembered after you leave this world?

[00:26:23] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Ultimately for my children, like Mom to Jack and Daniel Blemker, number one, then wife to Wes and the rest of my family. I think, ultimately, that's the most important, right? And then as a mentor to my students.

[00:26:41] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah.

[00:26:42] Dr. Silvia Blemker: And then for like, you know, doing things that help people. Products that we've put out there, I feel like we've had an impact and we continue to see the potential impact. But honestly, that isn't really about me. It's about the impact. So I don't know that I-- I guess it's good to get credit for stuff like that, but ultimately it's just cool to know that it's had an impact and it's really connected to a lot of people not just me, so I think it's cool like sometimes I do reflect on, when I see cool stuff that the company's doing like "Wow, that was my idea. That's cool." But it's like not just that, right? An idea is just an idea. There's so much more. And the people that we have at Springbok doing, it's just a fantastic team of just ridiculously smart people who are also great, work well as a team and really value having a positive environment and they're fun. They're funny. So that's all cool.

[00:27:39] Lindsey Dinneen: That's awesome. That is so cool. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And then final question. What is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?

[00:27:50] Dr. Silvia Blemker: I have a few different things, maybe. Well, the first one that comes to mind, honestly, is every time, and this is one of my favorite things about doing Springbok, is every time we get like an interesting new scan in, and we look at a large range of individuals now from people with muscle disease, neuromuscular disease, and all the way to NBA players and everywhere in between. But whenever I see one that's different, I'm like, "Ooh, that's cool. That makes me smile." So I guess that's muscles. And then also, I guess the other one is just seeing like a mentee or student shine in some way. One of my former student just defended her PhD two weeks ago, and just sitting there watching her do her PhD defense, she's phenomenal. It was just amazing. I mean, who wouldn't smile at that? But

[00:28:43] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Oh, that's amazing, and I love how it all ties together, just your answers are consistent, but I, what I love about hearing that is this just thread of appreciation for muscles and anatomy and impact and the students and the lives that you're touching. So I, you know, I definitely, I love that you're doing what you love and that it brings you joy. That's the best. Yeah.

[00:29:11] Dr. Silvia Blemker: That's so nice. That makes me smile.

[00:29:15] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, I love that. Well, thank you so much for your time today. This has been such a joy for me actually, to get to talk to you and learn more about your background and what gives you energy, what gets you up in the morning. And so I just really appreciate you sharing about all the great work that you're doing. And I just wish you the most continued success as you work to change lives for a better world.

[00:29:38] Dr. Silvia Blemker: Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks for producing such a cool podcast. So very much appreciated.

[00:29:45] Lindsey Dinneen: much. Thank you. Well, thanks for bringing a smile to my face. And thank you also to everyone who is tuning in today. And if you're as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two and we'll catch you next time.

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