5 years after the Up and Comer Award – Brooke Odle

The “Up and Comer” Award was established in 2020 by the ASB Council of Fellows to foster mentoring and networking of post-doctoral trainees and early career faculty. This award allows our recipients to select a mentor from among the ASB Fellows. Dr. Booke Odle was in our first class of recipients in 2021 and she selected Dr. Daryl Thelen at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as her mentor. At the time of selection, Dr. Odle was an Assistant Professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. Her research interests include rehabilitation engineering and ergonomics. Her recent work focuses on the biomechanics of manual patient-handling task performance and developing interventions to mitigate the risk of musculoskeletal injury associated with task performance in nursing personnel. In addition to her successes in the classroom and research, including a feature in Hope College’s winter edition of “Hope College News”, Dr. Odle was awarded ASB’s highest honor for mentoring, the Jean Landa Pytel Award in 2025.

Thanks to the Up and Comer Award, Dr. Odle received mentorship that was specific to where she was in her career from a Fellow who had also started his academic career at Hope College. During regular virtual meetings she was able to receive advice about how to streamline teaching, so that she would have time for research. She also received coaching on topics like how to successfully develop a research program with undergraduates, how to make entry into research have minimal pre-requisite knowledge, and how to mentor students through tasks like making effective figures. He also provided mentorship on what small grants to write like a RESTORE grant from Stanford.

Dr. Odle also spent several days at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she was able to network with a wide range of potential collaborators in fields such as biomedical and mechanical engineering, kinesiology, orthopedics, and athletics. She was able to observe a laboratory environment that was collegial and fun, along with being productive, which helped her shape her own laboratory culture.

Dr. Odle noted that she valued the mentorship provided by the Up and Comer Award because it was the coaching she needed in her current career stage. This was different from prior mentoring that had focused on being successful in her PhD and post-doc research and getting her to the next phase of her career (a tenure-track faculty position). She also likes that the Up and Comers are able to present in an award session at the ASB Annual Meeting, as that gives them more exposure.

We’re excited to share that Dr. Odle was recently promoted to Associate Professor with tenure!! She exemplifies the spirit of the Up and Comer Award and the success we hope to support for all our recipients. If you or someone you know would be a great candidate to be an Up and Comer, please check out the eligibility and application process on the ASB Competitive Grant Awards page. This award is listed at the very bottom of the page… but good things come to those who wait! And we can’t wait to see all the great things to come from all of our Up and Comers.