CoE brain injury research spurring ongoing national dialogue
Eric Nauman, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Engineering Honors Program, and HIRRT, the Human Injury Research & Regenerative Technologies Labat Purdue, has been quoted recently in articles in Time magazine and ESPNW online, on his lab’s research showing the need for hit counts in football and the strong similarity between the damaging force of football hits to the brain and hits taken by soccer players who head the ball.
The Time article points to the measurable neurocognitive impairment in football players who’ve taken hits but never showed symptoms of a concussion as further evidence that helmets should be equipped with sensors that measure hit force and frequency. The ESPNW article quotes Nauman saying, “The percentages of 100g hits was effectively the same between women’s college soccer and American football, which really surprised us. And while American football players tend to take more hits overall in a given practice session and game, the college soccer players were getting hit every day, and so it evened out.“
Nauman’s research on brain injury has been covered by more than 200 media outlets since 2013.