September 26, 2025 Interdisciplinary team culture of PANTHER TBI program celebrated in fall 2025 meeting Written By: Caitlin Scott Departments: Biomedical Engineering|Electrical & Computer Engineering|Mechanical Engineering Categories: Research The annual PANTHER meeting last week in Madison highlighted the success of interdisciplinary teamwork across the College with participants from the Departments of Mechanical Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering, as well as companies across Wisconsin. This year the PANTHER program recorded a record turn-out with close to 100 participants and over 60 research posters showcasing its innovative, transformative work on traumatic brain injury prevention and protection. Participants from PANTHER’s over 30+ active academic and industry Principal Investigators joined in for a fun and intense 2-day workshop highlighting their current understanding of the cellular basis of traumatic brain injury and featuring cutting edge research from cellular injury detection and mitigation to the latest brain-protection in hard hat construction, bicycle, and military helmets. Industry partners Milwaukee Tool and Trek are tightly integrated with PANTHER and highlighted their new product lines which are leveraging PANTHER science and research. PANTHER PI Christian Franck “Think of traumatic brain injury as a 10,000 piece puzzle, through PANTHER we are finally now at a point where we can see the actual picture of how the injury happens emerge through all of these pieces. That is, our recently formulated hypotheses on how exactly the brain gets injured allows us to fit together decades of TBI research into a single unifying picture, which is truly exciting and game changing,” shares PANTHER principal investigator and Bjorn Borgen Professor of Mechanical Engineering Christian Franck. The workshop highlighted the incredibly successful team approach of students, postdocs, staff, faculty, and industry engineers working together to translate basic science discoveries to tangible consumer products and warfighter protection. This program is the largest and most integrated University-led program globally with a focus on TBI protection and prevention. Read more on PANTHER: New design framework makes it easier to create custom shock-absorbing materials Moldable, flexible sensor is a versatile option for detecting irregularities in everything from manufacturing to mobility ECE student Carissa Roper’s poster earned first place out of 60 presentations at this year’s Workshop.