Interview with Sharmila Majumdar by Alexa Rocourt

Q: In a couple sentences, tell me about what you do in your work.

Everybody has lower back pain and everybody has joint pain. So the kind of work I do is aimed at ways in which we can reduce lower back pain or joint pain. Usually, lower back pain and joint pain (in the long run) ends up in surgical procedures, like total joint replacements or back surgeries. This is not only an issue for the quality of life, but it’s also an economic issue.

So I do quantitative imaging of the joints and of the lower back of the musculoskeletal system, which basically links the quantitative features we acquire from these 3-dimensional images, which links to the biomechanics of the skeleton (the way it works and moves) and indicates why the joints fail.

Q: What’s your favorite part about being a scientist?

I love working with the incoming students, postdocs, researchers from a variety of areas. I like the fact that we have a multidisciplinary team. We have computer scientists and residents from radiology and orthopedic surgery. Getting the whole team together and linking them to one another is really important to me.

Q: What have you created or discovered that you are most proud of?

One of the projects we did was on individuals who have had torned ACL ligaments. Typically, it’s considered to be fine after surgery, but the issue is that even after surgery, the mechanics and the biomechanics of the joints are never restored. So, these individuals end up having osteoarthritis, which is a degeneration of the joint. They lose their cartilage and they are on their way to knee replacements. So we did a project in multiple centers and derived quantitative numbers from MR images, which predicted which individuals were likely to progress in osteoarthritis.

This will be very important in terms of athletes returning to play. It’s as traumatic as brain injury in football players. For basketball, knee and ankle injury is very critical. So that’s the work that the most exciting right now.

The other work that we’re doing is work with machine and deep learning, which is a new computer-based way of gathering large resources of data. We are applying that to imaging, to again understand: which features in the images could predict whether or not an individual would end up getting a total joint replacement. So we are learning as we go.

Q: At the end of the day, why does your work matter?

If we could prevent (by simple interventions and/or deciding on an optimized time for athletes to return to play) people from a joint replacement down the road or delay it for even 10-15 years, it would have a tremendous impact on people’s lives. Lower back pain is also a huge issue. So if we could find the source of the back pain in individuals, so that they don’t go through a whole range of wasted therapies, and target the therapy to the tissue that is really causing the problem, that would be a tremendous impact in terms of the quality of life, because lower back pain is the single most disabling feature today in the world, in terms of people not being able to go to work.

Q: Outside of work, what do you do to relax?

I listen to audiobooks, I force my son to go to the gym, I watch TV and I cook. I don’t really have that much time off, but whatever I have, I make the most of it.

Q: What situation do you think you’d feel the most out-of-place in?

Singing publicly. Even privately. I can’t sing.

Q: In 100 years, what do you want to be remembered for?

The person I was and the difference I made in people’s lives by my interactions. As a good wife, partner, mother and friend, and that I impacted life positively for people.