This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports studying the relationship between microscopic structure (‘microstructure’) and macroscopic function of cartilage when forces are applied that are similar to what is experienced in everyday life. Cartilage health is important to human health, as the main feature of osteoarthritis is cartilage loss. Osteoarthritis is a painful disease that affects about 30 million adults in the United States. Once a person loses cartilage, there is no treatment to regrow cartilage. Currently, little is known about cartilage microstructure, forces, and function, especially from measurements made in young and middle-aged adults before osteoarthritis usually begins. While new medical imaging tools provide an exciting opportunity to see changes in microstructure before cartilage loss, how much altered microstructure relates to cartilage function is still unknown. Proposed research will improve our current scientific understanding of cartilage and help patients at risk for osteoarthritis in the future. Community outreach events will engage and inspire middle and high school students from Vermont and include hands-on activities that show how changing what a material is made of impacts its function. The research project investigates the links between quantitative magnetic resonance imaging metrics of cartilage microstructure, experimentally derived function of articular cartilage, and statistical modeling of bone shape. The studies supp