Damien Callahan, Faculty Profile

Damien Callahan

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY

BY MATT COOPER, OREGON QUARTERLY PHOTO BY CHRIS LARSEN, UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS

Damien Callahan has long studied how to help older adults bounce back from knee replacement and other orthopedic injuries that can be crippling, even life-threatening.

Now he’s seeking insights from a group that might seem unrelated: elite athletes.

Callahan studies how muscle plasticity influences rehabilitation after injury. Currently, he’s examining the role of cellular muscle proteins in soft-tissue injuries in female athletes. Women are at five to seven times greater risk of muscle and ligament tears.

In the lab, Callahan’s research team runs women and men through demanding knee-extension exercises, to exhaustion. Immediately after, the researchers collect muscle tissue samples through a needle muscle-biopsy technique and isolate individual muscle fibers—roughly the width of a human hair—under a microscope. Stress tests measure the power in each fiber and the mechanical stiffness of the tissue, yielding insights in comparisons of male and female samples and fibers from muscles that are fatigued or at rest.

Though the structure of muscle cells is the same in females and males, there are subtle yet important differences in the proteins that make up these cells. That could account for differences between the sexes in injuries like ACL tears, Callahan says, and a better understanding of those differences could yield new methods to prevent tissue injury—not just in athletes, he adds, but in anyone.

“We can understand things about the molecular mechanisms in athletes,” Callahan says, “that will inform what we want to learn in older adults.”

Callahan’s work is supported by the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, a global research effort that includes the University of Oregon and five other founding institutions. The alliance uses science to promote peak performance for athletes and wellness for everyone. The UO’s efforts are based in the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact.