Nicole Ramo

PhD

Nicole received her BS in Mechanical Engineering from Kettering University (Flint, Michigan) in 2012. Through Kettering’s co-operative education program, she worked as a research assistant in the Bone and Joint Center of Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Her three years at Henry Ford culminated in an undergraduate thesis on the dynamic in-vivo joint motion of the cervical spine following fusion and arthroplasty. Nicole received her PhD in Bioengineering from Colorado State University (CSU) in 2018. Her doctoral research in the OBRL focused on modeling the viscoelastic behavior of the soft tissues that make up the spinal-cord-meningeal complex; the long-term goal of this work is to quantify the effects of geometric and constitutive model simplifications on finite element predictions of internal spinal cord stress and strain during traumatic loading scenarios.

While serving as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at CSU, Nicole developed a passion for undergraduate engineering education. She served as the inaugural Graduate Teaching Fellow for the School of Biomedical Engineering during the 2016/2017 academic year. Wanting to continue this work after she earned her PhD, Nicole accepted a position as an Instructional Post-Doc with University of Michigan’s Transforming Engineering Education Laboratory. In this role, she assists both with curriculum improvement efforts at University of Michigan and with curriculum development for a new biomedical engineering program at Shantou University in Guangdong Province, China. Nicole will spend the 2019/2020 academic year teaching full time at Shantou University.

In her personal time, Nicole enjoys watching college sports, reading, and visiting local breweries.