The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every department at the University of Oregon, and the Human Physiology Department is no different. The department’s Bowerman Sports Science Clinic has adapted its operations to accommodate public health regulations while still conducting its research.
The BSSC is a research facility on campus that, in addition to its research activities, offers services to local athletes relating to prosthetics, injury prevention and performance optimization, according to the clinic’s website. As the clinic’s director, UO professor Michael Hahn’s role in the clinic is to provide oversight and support to its student researchers, he said, as well as handling administrative duties like applying for grants and ordering supplies.
Hahn has witnessed his lab transform over the past year, mostly as a result of COVID-19-related restrictions.
Before the pandemic, a typical Monday afternoon in the clinic might have included an Olympian on a treadmill getting their blood-lactate levels tested, an amputee trying on a new prosthetic limb and countless water-cooler discussions between PhD students, undergraduate researchers and visiting scholars, Hahn said.
“We were a pretty loose and free-flowing group before,” he said. “You might have half a dozen people a day coming and going, brainstorming ideas.”
Work in the clinic was severely disrupted in March when the university halted virtually all research activity on campus in an effort to stop the spread of COVID-19. Unlike in some departments, much of the research done in the BSSC is reliant on data gathered from human subjects, Hahn said, which presents a high risk of COVID-19 transmission.
UO Director of Strategic Research Initiatives Kate Petcosky-Kulkarni — who helped design and implement the university’s plan for restarting research activities — said her team had to weigh the research interests of students and faculty across campus with guidance from the Oregon Health Authority, as well as with local COVID-19 case counts, when deciding when different types of research can restart.
The university is using a staged approach for reopening research facilities, with each successive stage permitting more research activity than the one before. UO initiated stage 0 in March, and only allowed lab activity related to COVID-19 research, that was essential to maintaining functional lab equipment or involved caring for animals that would otherwise have to be euthanized.
“And then we realized that only allowed for the most minimal lot of work to be done,” Petcosky-Kulkarni said. “It did not provide a path forward for folks to engage in research activities where they could otherwise risk losing long-term subject data, or risk not meeting grant expectations.”
Stage 1, which the university initiated in June, encourages researchers to submit a Research Recovery Plan to the university outlining how they plan to conduct their research while adhering to COVID-19 safety protocol. This allows researchers to proceed with projects that require human subjects, she said, provided they can be done safely.
For Hahn and his students, that means strict schedules and limited lab capacity — a far cry from the unrestrained comings and goings of years past. Only a handful of researchers are allowed in the lab at a time, he said, and everyone must record their activities in the lab’s log.
As for interacting with human subjects, researchers must maintain a six-foot distance whenever possible and allow breaks in their schedules for cleaning lab equipment. However, some studies require that subjects be fitted with complicated sensors and measurement devices, which often puts researchers in close contact with them.
To work around this problem, Hahn and his students either demonstrate how to apply these devices on themselves, or create instructional how-to videos explaining the process to their subjects.
“We’ve been creative in the way we get some of our research done,” Hahn said, “to the point where we don’t really feel the suffering.”
Hahn said one of the hardest adjustments for him and his students has been the increased difficulty in sharing their work with the wider scientific community. Researchers regularly attend scientific conferences throughout the year, Hahn said, where they present their work and share ideas with scientists from institutions around the world.
These conferences provide valuable networking opportunities for both students and professors through discussions with other scientists, which often take place during casual conversations after a presentation, he said.
“I often recruit students this way,” Hahn said. “Or if we have a faculty hire coming up, we try to broadcast it at those meetings.”
He said this environment is completely different in a virtual setting. Instead of initiating spontaneous discussions with other scientists, students must deliberately schedule specific meetings with the people they want to speak with, he said, which limits the number of connections they can make.
The clinic currently has four students engaged in active research projects. Fourth-year PhD student Seth Donahue is developing a prosthetic device that utilizes machine learning to help its user better adapt to different types of walking environments. When the university shut down research activity in March, Donahue was in the early stages of writing his dissertation proposal and was preparing to begin another set of data collection that would require more human subjects.
To avoid having to delay his graduation, Hahn gave Donahue the option to graduate in the winter term of 2021 with the work he had, even though he hadn’t collected all the data he had planned to, Donahue said. After thinking it over, though, Donahue said he decided he’d rather stay for a fifth year and see his work to completion than cut his project short and graduate earlier.
Donahue said that while the uncertainty he felt at the beginning of the pandemic was hard, he is grateful for the time he had to reflect on his research, and he believes his final dissertation project will be better as a result.
“I really took that initial three or four months of the pandemic and took a really close look at what I was doing, how I was doing it and why I was doing it like that,” Donahue said. “It was actually a really great time for my growth and development as a researcher.”
