Beth A. Winkelstein’s pioneering research focuses on the mechanisms of bodily injury -- especially injuries from sports, automobile accidents or degenerative diseases that produce persistent pain in the neck and spine -- and has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense, among many others, including a Presidential Early Career Award from the NSF.
The author of Orthopaedic Biomechanics (2012) and more than a hundred papers and book chapters, she serves as editor of the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering and is a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which awarded her its Y.C. Fung Young Investigator Award in 2006.
At Penn, she served as associate dean for undergraduate education in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and before that as chair of the Graduate Group in Bioengineering and as a Penn Fellow, the cross-University program for select faculty members to develop leadership skills, build alliances across disciplines and gain deeper knowledge of University governance. In partnership with Dean Dennis DeTurck of the College of Arts and Sciences, she led Penn’s multi-year grant from the American Association of Universities to improve the quality of teaching in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, especially through new techniques of active in-class learning.
SEAS students twice awarded her the Ford Motor Company Award for Faculty Advising, and in 2012-13 she led the cross-campus working group that studied best practices in undergraduate research as part of the University’s reaccreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
Winkelstein has taught at Penn since 2002, following a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in bioengineering from Duke University. She received a B.S.E. cum laude in bioengineering from Penn in 1993, as a Benjamin Franklin Scholar.
