UCSD Bioengineering Faculty Featured Prominently in the $220M Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance
The Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance is a collaborative effort with six public and private institutions to transform global human health. In partnership with Stanford University, The Salk Institute, University of Oregon, University of Kansas and Boston Children’s Hospital, the UC San Diego team is studying the scientific principles underlying athletic performance and translating our research to help optimize human health, fitness, and thriving for all people. This Alliance was launched in 2021 through a 10-year $220M philanthropic investment from the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation
The UC San Diego team is led by Professor and IEM Director Andrew McCulloch and includes nine dynamic and innovative faculty from Bioengineering, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Orthopedic Surgery and Biological Sciences including Professors Adam Engler, Stephanie Fraley, Robert Sah and Daniela Valdez-Jasso in Bioengineering, as well as our many collaborators at the other institutions including Professor Todd Coleman at Stanford. UC San Diego is home to the Multiscale Athlete moonshot and the Triton Center for Performance and Injury Science innovation hub of the alliance.
We know that different training regimes and external factors such as sleep and nutrition are important and impact performance, but we don’t know how they work. Through this endeavor, we will investigate the mechanisms of peak performance at scales from the whole body to organs and muscles to the sub-cellular factors that influence how we move, engage, and thrive.
-Andrew McCulloch, PhD, lead investigator
An Interconnected Synergistic Approach:
Athletic performance is the physical and mental whole-body expression of the integrated function of all major physiological systems, including the musculoskeletal, neuroendocrine, and cardiovascular systems. The biological responses of these physiological systems to training, sleep, diet, stress, injury, and other factors depends on the integration of the molecular, multicellular, and extracellular matrix dynamics that determine the functional states of tissues.
