This article was originally published on UVA Today
This Alum’s Tech May Revolutionize Knee Joint Replacements
Benjamin Holmes can pinpoint the exact moment he fell in love with the field of biomedical engineering. As a third-year student at the University of Virginia more than a decade ago, he was taking an introductory course taught by School of Engineering and Applied Science professor Silvia Blemker. Engineering of Musculoskeletal Tissue focused on the biomechanics, as well as the biology and physics, of the human body.
During a class, Blemker played a GIF that showed how muscles worked, and Holmes, who until that point had been mainly focused on mechanical engineering, was mesmerized.
“This is extremely nerdy, but I have this very clear memory of it,” he said. “It’s just an incredible process – a chemical change causes these structures to move. When you think about how much we take for granted just talking, walking, moving your arm, holding things…
“There’s this complex, very fast biological process that makes that happen. That was the moment that really clicked for me, just in terms of how cool the body and biology are.”
Holmes went on to graduate from UVA with a mechanical engineering degree in 2009, but the moment led to the Fairfax native getting his master’s degree and Ph.D. in biomaterials and regenerative medicine from George Washington University.
In 2016, Holmes, through the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps Hub program – commonly known in the tech world as “I-Corps” – started a company called Nanochon