Pete Lisman

Pete Lisman is on a mission to better predict and prevent musculoskeletal injuries. “So many factors play a potential role in athletic injury: aerobic fitness, muscular strength and endurance, previous injury, and movement quality and balance, among other things,” explains Lisman. “The more holistic approach you take, the more factors you can consider.”

Through a collaborative initiative between the kinesiology department, Towson Athletics, and the Towson University Sports Medicine Team, Lisman and colleagues are collecting data on all incoming freshman and transfer student-athletes attending Towson University and will follow them over time to study injury prevention.

“We will have an ongoing battery of tests that athletes perform biannually to help us determine the greatest factors associated with sport injuries and performance,” says Lisman.

“ This is a strong department with strong faculty, who are pushing to get more undergraduates involved in research. ”

“Students will help us collect questionnaire data on eating habits, injury history and sleep information. They will learn to score or grade assessments and to analyze data,” explains Lisman, who notes that kinesiology students often present findings at regional conferences of organizations such as the American College of Sports Medicine and the National Athletic Trainers’ Association.

“This is an exceptional department with strong faculty, who are pushing to get more undergraduates involved in research,” says Lisman. “Students are using these experiences to make themselves more marketable for job and graduate studies. There are a multitude of things one can do in these fields.”

In other work, Lisman is completing research at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., on members of the military before they begin basic training.

“Our goal is to see if any assessments are helpful in predicting future injuries since musculoskeletal injuries have a direct effect on military manpower,” explains Lisman. Half of all female recruits and a quarter of male recruits suffer musculoskeletal injuries in basic training, which causes a big problem for operational readiness, according to Lisman. “Our greatest contribution to the military is to devise ways to help prevent these injuries.”