The Philadelphia Section of the STLE is pleased to award a $1,250 scholarship to Emily Lambeth, a fifth-year graduate student in Biomedical Engineering. Working under the direction of Associate Professor Christopher Price, Lambeth had made fundamental advances in the study of cartilage lubrication done in the Price and Burris labs at U. Delaware.
Lambeth’s work has confirmed cartilage’s unique capacity to recover interstitial fluid content/ pressure via articulation driven tribological rehydration, and for interstitial lubrication to synergize with synovial fluid presence to support vanishingly low interfacial frictions. This work has been the focus of recent podium presentations by Lambeth at multiple national conferences. Furthermore, this work laid the foundation for her most recent studies investigating the components of synovial fluid namely, hyaluronic acid (HA), lubricin, etc. that contribute to lubrication synergy among tribological rehydration, interstitial lubrication, and synovial fluid presence. This work has shown that HA presence is critical in establishing/permitting synergistic lubrication in rapidly, but physiologically, sliding convergent stationary contact area (cSCA) contacts. Lambeth has found that synergistic lubrication is highly sensitive to HA concentration and molecular weight, consistent with recent studies investigating the effect of synovial fluid dilution and degradation on lubrication. Furthermore, she has demonstrated that synergistic lubrication can be replicated using a synthetic, large molecular weight, polyethylene glycol (PEG) based bathing solution at concentrations of that of HA in synovial fluid. These data suggest that synergistic lubrication is not ‘unique’ to HA solutions or synovial fluid but may be an attribute of bathing solution viscosity. This work has again been the focus of podium talks at national conferences.
Lambeth has an exceptional record of teaching and service. She has served as the Chair (2023-) and Co-Chair of UD’s Women in Engineering Chapter (2022-2023) and the department’s representative to WiE (2021-). She also served as a College of Engineering’s Empathetic Peers Offering Wisdom, Encouragement, and Resources (EMPOWER) mentor (2020-2022) and the Mentorship Chair of the UD Graduate Chapter of the Biomedical Engineering Society (2020-2022).