Dr. Rachel Surowiec is an Assistant Professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University, with a courtesy appointment in Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine. Following her Master's in Biomechanics, she worked as a Senior Research Scientist dually appointed in Imaging Research and Biomedical Engineering at the Steadman Philippon Research Institute in Vail, Colorado. She returned to academia to complete her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering with a Biomedical Imaging Concentration at the University of Michigan, followed by postdoctoral training at the Center for Molecular Imaging (University of Michigan) and in Anatomy, Cell Biology, and Physiology at IUSM. Her lab - the Quantitative Biomedical Imaging and Sciences (QBIS) Lab - is based in Indianapolis, embedded in the clinical and research ecosystem of IU Health, Riley Hospital for Children, and the Regenstrief Institute. That geography matters. The QBIS Lab moves constantly between controlled experiments and real patients, using advanced imaging, machine learning, and biomechanics to ask questions about tissue quality that conventional tools simply can't answer. A lot of that work centers on bone - not just how much there is, but what it's actually made of. Bone water and collagen turn out to be powerful but largely invisible markers of skeletal health, and the lab has spent years developing imaging and spectroscopy tools to measure them. That same curiosity about tissue quality is now driving work on how obesity and rapid weight loss - including GLP-1 therapies like semaglutide - affect the adolescent skeleton during the very window when kids are still building it. In collaboration with Dr. Brian DeBosch at IUSM, the lab is deeply phenotyping adolescents starting semaglutide at Riley, trying to understand who loses bone and muscle during treatment and who doesn't - and what the imaging can tell us about why. On the preclinical side, the same DeBosch collaboration has produced some genuinely unexpected findings about how circadian and metabolic clock genes regulate bone quality in ways that don't show up on a standard DXA scan. Meanwhile, the lab's AI-driven radiomics pipeline - originally built for bone disease in chronic kidney disease - is being extended into muscle, lung, and pediatric imaging, with a firm conviction that if you can't see what the model is doing, it doesn't belong in a clinic. Beyond the lab, she loves hanging with her three amazing kids, running (slowly), and gardening (totally subpar).