Josh Roth, PhD, an assistant professor in the UW Departments of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation and Mechanical Engineering, has received a five-year $630,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award to advance research on knee joint instability and its role in osteoarthritis.

While joint instability often limits mobility and accelerates the progression of osteoarthritis, the root cause of this instability is not well understood. Dr. Roth’s project aims to untangle the contributions of ligaments and muscles to joint stability, providing tools and insights that could lead to more personalized and effective treatments.

“Understanding joint instability is a tricky problem because the ligaments and muscles work together to stabilize the joint,” Roth says. “It’s really difficult using existing techniques to determine which structure is contributing to stability or which structure is deficient in someone who has an unstable joint.”

With support from his NSF CAREER Award, Dr. Roth will develop an active knee exoskeleton and novel measurement techniques to provide researchers with tools to help determine whether instability stems primarily from ligament damage, muscle weakness, or a combination of both. This information could help clinicians better tailor treatment strategies, from rehabilitation programs to surgical interventions.

“Many patients, especially those with severe osteoarthritis, will require both surgical treatment and rehabilitation. Figuring out how ligaments and muscles work together to stabilize the knee will inform the surgery as well as the post-surgery rehabilitation to really help an individual patient get back to their activities,” Roth says.

While the project focuses on knee osteoarthritis, the methods Dr. Roth is developing may also be applied to other joint conditions. A portion of the award will support educational initiatives, including undergraduate engineering design projects and entrepreneurship training that teaches students how to identify and address real-world healthcare needs.

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Read more about Dr. Roth’s NSF CAREER Award and his efforts to improve the diagnosis and treatment of osteoarthritis on the UW College of Engineering website.

The NSF CAREER Award is the foundation’s premier award for early-career faculty. It recognizes researchers who demonstrate the potential to serve as academic role models through outstanding research and education.

It took something as small as the width of a motorcycle tire to change Jack Brucks’ life forever.

Brucks, then 10 years old, was riding a single-piston motorcycle in a flat-track training session — his specialty — in Texas when his front wheel struck a tire that was on the track as a marker, sending him flying in the air. When he landed, his right hip was virtually shattered.

“I hit a tire, did a front flip, landed, screamed, and I don’t remember much after that,” he said.

The next thing he knew, he was being tended to by adults, and an ambulance was on the way. He was taken to Conroe County Hospital for emergency treatment and then to Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston for surgery to stabilize his hip, and his arms and ribs, which were also broken in the crash. Brucks’ hip was dislocated and severely fractured, which included damage to his femoral head and growth plate.

Brucks was in Texas at a training camp with friends, while his family was hundreds of miles away in Georgia for a wedding. The crash set off a frantic rush to get to Brucks as quickly as possible, according to his mom, Katie Brucks.

“I remember it like it was yesterday, we were all getting ready to go to the airport to go home — and we got the call,” she said.

Katie went to Texas, while the rest of the family went back to Wisconsin. She was able to get there in time for his surgeries. After four days of recovery, Katie and Jack flew back to Wisconsin.

The Brucks family owns and operates Lucky Stables horse riding school at their home property just west of Neenah. Because of their business, Katie posts often on social media, and after posting photos of X-ray images of Jack’s hip online, she almost immediately received a message from a friend who is a doctor, offering advice about Jack’s follow-up care.

“He said, ‘Katie, no doctor in the Fox Valley is good enough for him, this is big,’” she said.

The best plan of treatment

Katie began an urgent search for the best doctors to work on Jack’s hip, but when the time came to make a choice, UW Health stood out, she said.

“They had the best doctors, the best plan to treat him and it’s in Wisconsin, which was huge for us,” Katie said.

Jack began racing motorcycles on the frozen water of Lake Winnebago at age 4, and quickly progressed to racing on flat dirt tracks around Wisconsin. At age 6, he won his first state junior championship in 2016, and by 2019, he won his first junior national championship. Clearly, flat-track motorcycle racing was his passion, but the crash in 2020 put all of that in danger, and in the hands of Drs. Pamela Lang and David Goodspeed, both orthopedic surgeons at UW Health.

Upon meeting them, there was a bit of a surprise, according to Katie.

“We went to his first follow-up appointment at UW Health, and they didn’t let us go home,” she said.

When Jack was seen by the team at UW Health, they determined more surgeries would be needed to repair the damage done in the crash.

“This injury was so severe, and the surgeries so complex, we prepared the family for the possibility he may not walk without assistance again, let alone race a motorcycle,” said Goodspeed, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

“Any operation on the head and neck [of the femur], especially with young people, requires some specialized techniques to be able to dissect around the blood supply of the femoral head to try to preserve it,” he said. “We had to put his fractures back into place and then fix them in a way that we could preserve the blood supply to the head.”

Lang, who is no longer with UW Health, and Goodspeed performed two surgeries on his right hip. They were successful, but the path back to racing was still not certain, and there would be months of rehab while he healed and future surgeries to remove the hardware in his hip. If all of that was successful, he could maybe race again.

That hope was all he needed, Jack said.

“Racing kept me going when it got hard; it’s my passion, it’s all I ever wanted to do,” he said.

During his rehab, which included two days in the hospital followed by monthly — eventually every three to six months — trips to UW Health in Madison to learn exercises and receive checkups, his care was overseen by Dr. Andrea Spiker, orthopedic surgeon at UW Health, and an assistant professor in the Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.

Spiker, who is also director of the UW Hip Preservation Program, performed the last of Jack’s surgeries in 2024 to address the cartilage on the head of his femur and fix the labrum in his hip.

“In talking with Dr. Goodspeed, our discussion centered around what could we do next to get Jack back to his high level of athletic function, pain-free and to preserve his native hip as long as possible,” she said.

That included a different set of wheels, as he started life after the crash in a wheelchair before progressing to a walker and crutches. For the next six months, there were ups and downs physically and emotionally. He had a setback just as he thought he would be out of the wheelchair, as a more extensive surgery was necessary to remove the hardware in his hip because the bone had grown around it. This forced him to rest again, and to do more rehab.

A return to racing

Jack continued to heal, but the mental aspect of his rehab was taking a toll. So, he snuck in a motorcycle ride in his yard at home.

“After I got back on a bike, that helped,” he said. “I kind of told myself, ‘I can come back; we’re good.’”

As his rehab progressed, it was clear he would walk well again, which left the door open for racing. The care team at UW Health did their best to make sure that was the case, according to Katie.

The doctors at UW Health not only believed in him but tailored his care with a return to racing in mind,” she said. “They knew how much this meant to him.”

He returned to racing in a big way. He took second in his first race back after being cleared to race in May 2021. He went on to win another national junior championship, and continued to rise through the amateur ranks, joining an elite team from Florida called 1st Impressions Racing — but the best was yet to come. In December 2025, Jack secured his first professional contract with 1st Impressions. Having graduated high school early, Jack, now 16, can finally make flat-track motorcycle racing his calling.

“All I can say is a huge ‘thank you’ to all the people at UW Health for what they did for me,” Jack said. “To fulfill my dream of racing means everything, racing is my life.”

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This story originally appeared on uwhealth.org.

Wan-Ju Li, PhD

Wan-Ju Li, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation, and fellow researchers Wei Xu, PhD, a professor in the Department of Oncology, and Nathan Welham, PhD, CCC-SLP, a professor in the Department of Otolaryngology, received a $50,000 Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center Focus Group Award, supported by a WARF gift, for their project, Stage-Resolved Regulation of Human Neural Crest Differentiation for Cartilage and Bone Generation.

Running from March 1, 2026, through February 28, 2027, this collaborative pilot study will strengthen musculoskeletal research at UW-Madison while laying the groundwork for future external funding. The team will refine a human-induced pluripotent stem cell model of neural crest-derived cells, which play a central role in the formation of cartilage, bone, and connective tissues of the face and head.

While the work is focused on craniofacial cartilage and bone, its significance could extend far beyond the craniofacial region. By learning how to better direct neural crest cells into skeletal tissues, the team hopes to uncover principles that could also be applied to orthopedic repair in joints such as the knee and hip. That is especially exciting because neural crest-derived nasal chondrocytes have already shown strong regenerative potential in translational and clinical studies for articular cartilage repair, including treatment of knee cartilage defects and osteoarthritic knees in Europe.

In the long term, this work could help drive a shift in cell therapy by advancing neural crest-derived cells as a powerful and practical platform for regenerating cartilage and bone. Because these cells are accessible and highly cartilage competent, they may offer important advantages over more conventional cell sources. For clinical orthopedics, the potential payoff is clear: better strategies for repairing focal cartilage injuries, improving osteochondral healing, and developing more durable biologic treatments for joint degeneration.

Your “dream job”? Many people hold that in mind and then try to find one as close as possible to it. David Bernhardt, MD, professor in the UW Departments of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation and Pediatrics, is one of those extraordinarily rare few who found his on the first try. Bernhardt specializes in primary care sports medicine and is the director of the Primary Care Sports Medicine Fellowship. He is a team physician for the University of Wisconsin Athletics Department, providing medical coverage for Badger men’s basketball and women’s volleyball, as well as for men’s and women’s cross country and track. And now, after 32 years doing the work he has loved, Bernhardt will step away into a deserved retirement on June 30.

A Madison native, Bernhardt decided in high school that he wanted to be a physician. “I kind of always knew I wanted to be a physician,” he said, “because my dad was a physician, and I admired what he did for patients. So I followed that path to become one.” Bernhardt also knew at that time that he wanted to be a sports medicine doctor.

While attending the then University of Wisconsin Medical School, he almost made a detour. In rotations, he found that he just did not enjoy orthopedic surgery, and at that time, that was the route many people took into sports medicine. “There were lifestyle reasons,” Bernhardt explained, “but the biggest reason was that the patients are so often asleep, and I enjoyed interacting with patients and caring for them in clinic. However, my very next rotation was pediatrics, which I loved.”

Serendipitously, he learned that Greg Landry was in the Department of Pediatrics. He was a general pediatrician primary care sports medicine doctor and the head team physician for UW athletics. “He had what I would call a dream job,” Bernhardt recalled.

“Right place, right time” magic manifested for Bernhardt when Landry offered him the opportunity to become the third-ever fellow for the Nathan Smith Postgraduate Sports and Adolescent Medicine Fellowship, which allowed him to train in primary care sports medicine at the University of Wisconsin. “And then he hired me into my dream job,” Bernhardt said.

Bernhardt’s patients include many outside UW athletics because of his three different hats of clinical practice. He is a general pediatrician at the UW Health clinic at 20 S. Park, where he sees patients from newborn to around 23 years of age. There, he addresses all the problems typically seen in pediatrics. He wears a second hat as the team physician for UW athletics, and his third practice is his job in primary care sports medicine, where he cares for young and older athletes.

“These patients are in high school, in college sports, and the occasional professional athlete,” he explained. “I also take care of the LOVB Madison, the professional volleyball team. And I take care of the typical recreational athlete and the old person who has arthritis.”

One thing Bernhardt always promotes to athletes and non-athletes alike is exercise. “We’ve had a mantra, first promoted by the American College of Sports Medicine, that exercise is medicine,” he said, “which means we should actually treat every patient as an athlete — trying to promote exercise as a part of a treatment plan.” Related to that, he uses exercise as treatment for kids he sees in his pediatric practice who have anxiety or depression. “I really try to emphasize that it’s important that they get out and move,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what they do — Frisbee, hiking, bike rides — I want them moving every day.”

After 32 years, David Bernhardt still loves his work, but he’s ready to try something new. He will retire on June 30.

Five Questions for David Bernhardt

How has your career surprised you, compared to how you had expected it to develop when you began?

I wanted to be a physician and wanted to go into sports medicine. The surprise was that I really loved my pediatrics rotation. I loved the residents I was working with, I loved the faculty who were teaching — the residents and the faculty wanted to teach, they respected my opinion. They made me feel that I was an important contributor to their team, so right away I just loved the whole pediatric part of medical school and medical education. The further surprise was that Greg Landry was in the Department of Pediatrics He offered me the sports medicine fellowship and eventually, my dream job. It was what I had expected to do, but via a different path.

What do you consider to be your biggest achievement?

I think that I’m a better doctor now than when I started, which is likely related to professional development in my wanting to learn the human aspects of being the best physician — as much or more so than knowing the science. I don’t think you get the training in medical school about how to be as compassionate and curious as you really need to be. In school, you learn to gather information, you learn how to do a physical exam, develop a differential diagnosis, but I think you miss the human part of being a doctor. So, I feel that my development there is my biggest achievement.

What has been your largest obstacle to overcome?

The constant tug of the job and wanting to do more for our patients, at the same time knowing our limits related to time and resources, as well as the taxing nature of our job in so many parts of our own lives.

What advice would you offer to new physicians just starting out?

I would stress the importance of work-life balance and making your own wellness and your own family a priority. I would also suggest continuing to expand your craft as a physician, thinking of yourself as a compassionate caretaker, good listener. And be curious: have a conversation with your patients similar to meeting a person at a coffeeshop or the terrace rather than just trying to get information doing a physical and telling them what to do.

Do you have specific plans for your retirement?

I’ll figure it out as I go: some mix of volunteer work, learning new things, travel, exercise, and seeing more of my kids, who live in Colorado.

This story originally appeared at pediatrics.wisc.edu.

Photo by Kate Feldt/Department of Pediatrics

UW Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation faculty were recognized with prestigious honors at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (AMSSM) in Seattle. Department Chair Dr. Tamara Scerpella received the Orthopedic Surgeon Excellence Award, becoming only the second recipient of this national honor. The award recognizes a surgeon who exemplifies collaboration, exceptional patient care, mutual respect, camaraderie, and a passion for helping athletes and active individuals of all ages. Dr. Scerpella was nominated by UW colleague Dr. Erin Hammer, who also presented the award at the meeting.

Associate Professor Andrew Watson, MD, received the Best Overall Research Abstract Award for his study, The Influence of Remote Mindfulness on Patient-Reported Outcomes Following Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction. This marks the second time Dr. Watson has earned the distinction, having previously received the award in 2023. The recognition continues UW-Madison’s remarkable success in sports medicine research, with UW faculty earning the award in six of the past seven years. Together, these honors reflect the department’s ongoing leadership in patient care, education, and innovative research that advances the field of sports medicine.