Dr. Matthews and Dr. Scott Selected to Attend Orthopaedic Research Society’s Young Investigator Initiative
Dr. Rachel Matthews and Dr. Matthew Scott, Postdoctoral Fellows in the Department of Orthopaedics at LSU Health Sciences Center, have been selected from an international pool of applicants to attend the Orthopaedic Research Society’s Young Investigator Initiative (YII), to be held October 17-19, 2025, in Rosemont, Illinois.
The YII is a multi-disciplinary grant mentoring and career development program that provides young investigators in the musculoskeletal sciences with guidance on constructing well-founded research proposals and securing funding for basic, translational, or clinical research.
Dr. Matthews, who earned her Ph.D. at LSU in Kinesiology, specializing in Exercise Physiology, focuses her research on the effects of stress on performance and metabolic function in athletes. Her YII proposal centered on developing and implementing an athlete monitoring approach based on minimizing the risk of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) that is tailored to the specific metabolic and bone health concerns of distance runners. The goal is to evaluate changes to bone health, as well as resting and exercising metabolism, which have been implicated in the RED-S paradigm, throughout a competitive track season as allostatic load fluctuates.
Dr. Scott earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the LSU School of Kinesiology where his doctoral work examined the effects of exercise on bone density and morphology in the context of older adults, diabetes, and ketogenic diets. His YII proposal concerns how marrow adiposity expands with age, obesity, and metabolic dysfunction, a phenomenon associated with decreased bone strength and increased fracture risk. While it has been shown that intermittent cold exposure increases bone mineral density and improves fracture healing, its effects on marrow adiposity are undetermined, and its effects on bone microarchitecture are poorly defined. This proposal aims to determine the effect of intermittent cold exposure on marrow adipose tissue volume and bone microarchitecture via the ex-vivo analysis of hind-limb bones from rats exposed to daily 5-minute water immersion at 10°C.
LSU Orthopaedics would like to congratulate Dr. Matthews and Dr. Scott on their acceptance and eagerly await how the trip went.
