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Maddie Klugman, who graduated from Byram Hills High School this year and is a freshman at Yale, has had an article of hers published in the October 2011 edition of Clinics in Sports Medicine.
Klugman, who studied science at Byram Hills, wrote her paper on the neuromuscular training of high school athletes. She completed the paper by studying high school soccer players at Byram Hills and New Rochelle high schools.
"I've always been very interested in exercise and nutrition and injury mechanisms," she said. "I played on the tennis team and never got injured but soccer and basketball athletes always did and I was curious why."
"When you're in contact sports you have lower limb injuries from doing pivot movements. It puts strain on the ligaments and you can get anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries," she added.
Klugman did research on ACL injuries during her sophomore year and worked with a mentor, Dr. Gregory Myer of the University of Cincinnati Children's Hospital. Dr. Myer developed a multiple camera analysis system to test athletes and Klugman used the system to test soccer players at Byram Hills and New Rochelle high schools.
"I took videos of them doing a tuck jump exercise, where they brought their knees to their chests while they were jumping. If they make mistakes on the jump they'll do it in the field so it was a good test for their risk of injury," she said.
"Myer confirmed Maddie's work and offered her first authorship on the research paper," Byram Hills science research director David Keith said. "The research is helpful to teens who frequently experience athletic injuries."
Klugman is a pre-med student at Yale, who's interested in a cognition science program.She values the three-year Science Research course she pursued at Byram Hills. "It was the most rewarding experience I had and I recommend it to anyone interested in science who has the passion to explore it for three years," she said.
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