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Joseph D. Towles, PhD

Member, Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance
THIS SITE IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED BY ME AS OF 2022. PLEASE GO TO MY NEW SITE AT https://sites.google.com/swarthmore.edu/biomechanics

Joseph D Towles
Associate Professor of Engineering
Swarthmore College

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Joseph Towles is a Lecturer jointly appointed in the Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering Departments at Stanford University. Joe’s teaching interests are in the areas of solid mechanics, neuromuscular biomechanics, dynamical systems and control, and engineering design. His scholarship interests are in the areas of neuromuscular biomechanics and educational practices in engineering.

A Mechanical Engineer by training, Joe earned his BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland Baltimore County and his MS and PhD degrees both in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University (1996-2003). Following graduate school, Joe was a research post-doctoral fellow and subsequently a research scientist and then a research assistant professor in neuromuscular biomechanics in the Sensory Motor Performance Program at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and in the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Department at Northwestern University (2003-2012). Additionally, Joe was a research health scientist for the Rehabilitation R&D Service in the Department of Veterans Affairs (Hines, IL) during that time and later a scientist in the neuromuscular biomechanics lab in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2012-2014). At the time, Joe led projects that addressed the broad question of how to restore hand function (ability to grasp objects) following cervical spinal cord injury and hemiparetic stroke using experimental and computational techniques in biomechanics. As a complement to intensively teaching within the undergraduate and graduate curricula in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2014-2018), and now teaching intensively and broadly within the undergraduate curricula of Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering at Stanford, Joe's scholarship interests include both biomechanics and educational practices in engineering. Recent educational projects have investigated factors that influence K-12 students' engagement/interest in bioengineering, integration of CATME into an undergraduate mechanical engineering design course that enhances student experience and performance, analytical tool for improving intra- and inter-team communication in an engineering design course, and factors important for teaching undergraduate students how to identify healthcare needs worth pursuing in the context of health technology innovation efforts.

Education

Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
PhD, Stanford University, Mechanical Engineering (2003)
MS, Stanford University, Mechanical Engineering (1998)
BS, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Mechanical Engineering (1996)