SAN DIEGO — Senior Jessica Carter can usually be found on the water, competing on the University of San Diego women's rowing team, or in a classroom on campus, where she is pursuing a degree in biology. But this summer, Carter spent her days in a USD lab chasing a question she says almost nobody is asking: What does pregnancy do to the way a body moves?
The lab relies on specialized animal models to map out muscle force. Working in the lab, Carter used advanced motion-capture technology to study the exact physical changes that come with motherhood, comparing the movement of animals that had never been pregnant and animals that were either pregnant or had given birth and were nursing/lactating. She observed that during pregnancy, movements naturally slowed down, while the nursing stage introduced a more crouched posture and decreased flexibility. For Carter, a senior and captain of the Torero women's rowing team, the findings were especially compelling given her own experience with movement, performance and the demands placed on the body.
"There's nothing out there that researches what it's like for a mother to come back to her sport after giving birth and how that affects their bodies," she said. "The lack of resources that females have versus males (in the sports science realm) is glaring."
That gap is what Associate Professor of Biology Nicole Danos, PhD, studies in USD's Department of Biology, and Carter has now spent two summers in her lab doing the same. Their collaboration will result in a manuscript to be published in a high impact journal that integrates Carter's research on the external patterns of movement with information from sensors about what is going on internally with the muscles and tendons. The work will also be presented at the annual Conference of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology this coming January in Pittsburgh.
Carter's interest isn't abstract. She tore both ACLs playing high school basketball in New Jersey, took up rowing as a junior, and came out of the surgeries wanting to better understand injuries like hers. She figured she'd be an orthopedic surgeon, until she decided medical school wasn't for her.
"It's hard being an athlete and going through ACL surgery," she said. "I've always wanted to help athletes with injuries."
Two summers ago, she was in a summer mathematics program and needed a data set. Her advisor knew she was interested in ACLs, women's health, and pregnancy, and sent her to Danos. Danos has noted publicly that her own research began with her first pregnancy, when she went looking for data on what was happening to her body and found very little.
"She has always been an advocate for pregnant mothers coming back to sport," Carter said. "She really reminded me of what it's like to be a woman in a niche community like STEM."
Carter remembers what Danos told her at their first meeting: "You're a female athlete. You are already doing the 1% that not a lot of people do."
They talked a lot about Serena Williams, whom Carter grew up watching and who, as Carter tells it, couldn't find the resources she needed when she was pregnant with her daughter.
Carter went on to share that working alongside Danos, and seeing her commitment to the research, was especially meaningful.
"Having somebody that believes in that was super inspiring to me, because I know what it's like to not have resources out there and understand what's going on with your body," Carter said. "I really look up to her in so many ways, because she really is paving the way for reproductive health in women and athletes."
This year Carter rejoined the lab in the Shiley Center for Science and Technology, working through the summer with postdoctoral researcher Adrian Arias, PhD. She'd get in around 9 a.m., "coffee in hand, obviously," and sit at a monitor tracking physical joints with an AI-powered motion-analysis program called DeepLabCut and coding in MATLAB.
Some days involved precise procedures to measure exactly how muscle tissue stretches under strain—experiences that became Carter's favorite part of the work due to the complex biomedical engineering involved.
She was the only undergraduate on the project, working alongside two postdocs, and the software took some getting used to. Some days she was there until 7 p.m.
"It was very much trial and error, because I was just learning the software," Carter said. "I was failing a couple times — had to try it over. And as an athlete, you already know. You're always getting feedback from your coach on the boat."
Research, she said, is hard work: a lot of reading, a lot of comprehension. "But I get that on an erg [rowing machine], on the water, any day."
Standing out isn't new to her, either. "The way I was raised was always: You're always going to stand out, but stand out in the best way that you can," she said.
She went through her own ACL recovery without a doctor who looked like her, which is part of why she does this work, and part of why she mentors young women from underrepresented backgrounds through USD.
"There's not a lot of practitioners or researchers that look like me or advocate for people that look like me," she said. "That was a big reason why I wanted to go into this."
Carter plans to stay for a fifth year, then go on to prosthetics and orthotics school and learn to build artificial limbs. She'd like more athletes to try research, women especially. A class she's taking this semester keeps coming back to how little research exists on female athletes.
"You don't have to be a STEM major to get into this," Carter said. "Yes, it helps, but any little bit counts. As athletes, we get overlooked a lot, especially females."
Carter credits USD for making a summer like this possible for a Division I athlete. "It gives you the opportunity and the connections to really figure out what you want to do with your life and what you're passionate about. As an athlete, we don't have a lot of time, so I think it's amazing that we get to create time and have this space to really explore what it means to be a researcher — somebody in STEM, a woman in STEM, a minority in STEM — but also have such an intense, competitive mindset as well.
"You really can do it all here."
