Dr. Beth Winkelstein earned a BSE (1993) in Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, then completed a PhD (1999) in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University, where her thesis advisor was Dr. Barry Myers.  After two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Orthopaedics at Dartmouth College, she return to her undergraduate alma mater, University of Pennsylvania, to take on the responsibilities of assistant professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Neurosurgery. Among her many honors, she has been awarded several recognitions from the Stapp Car Crash Conference: the John Paul Stapp Award for Best Paper of 2004; the Stapp Association Award for Best Student Paper, 2004, 2000 and 1999; and the 1997 Arnold W. Siegel Award for Most Outstanding Paper.  She has also received the Whitaker Foundation Young Investigator Research Award (2003-2005) and the NIH Research Career Award (KO1) (2002-2005).  She has published more than 20 articles in peer-reviewed journals, along with dozens of other academic articles, book chapters, conference papers and abstracts, and presentations at conferences, seminars and symposia.

Dr. Winkelstein’s research focuses primarily on understanding the mechanisms of injury that produce whiplash, sports-related, and other painful injuries, thereby defining the relationships between injury to the cervical spine/neck and physiological cascades of persistent pain.  Additional research efforts target the role of biomechanics in the neuroimmunologic changes of the central nervous system that contribute to persistent pain.  As Principal Investigator for a project within the SCIB, she is researching the injury mechanism of facet mediated whiplash neck pain, with the goal of ultimately defining physiological responses of neck pain in whiplash.