About Us

The Human Performance Lab (HPL) at Stanford University seeks to provide the Stanford Community with state-of-the-art approaches for optimizing performance and screening for risk factors associated with injury and illness, while furthering the understanding of Sports Science through an integrated research philosophy involving undergraduate and graduate students.

Goals

Provide sport science services to Stanford Athletics to optimize performance and reduce the risk of injury and illness.
Educate and empower coaches, athletic trainers & student-athletes to use sports science technologies in coaching and in designing and implementing their own training programs.
Participate in the campus-wide Health and Wellness initiative by providing fitness and health assessments and sport science services to the Stanford Community.
Produce quality interdisciplinary research in areas of sports medicine and sports science, with a focus on biomechanics and exercise physiology.

Organization

The Human Performance Lab at Stanford University operates within the Department of Orthopedics, in the Division of Sports Medicine. Operations within the Human Performance Lab are grouped into three main areas:

People

	Thor Besier, PhD – Director, Human Performance Lab at Stanford – Thor’s research interests are in mechanobiology and understanding mechanisms of musculoskeletal injury. Much of his work involves the development of biomechanical models from medical imaging data to estimate stress distributions in various tissues to understand injury mechanisms.
	Gordon Matheson, MD – Dr Matheson is the Director of the Stanford Sports Medicine Program, a Professor within the department of Orthopedics at Stanford, and an Adjunct Professor for the Program in Human Biology. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine and the Physician and Sports Medicine.
	Daniel Garza, MD - Dr. Garza is an Assistant Professor of Orthopaedics and Emergency Medicine at Stanford as well as the Medical Director for the San Francisco Forty-Niners of the National Football League. He is the co-coordinator of the Health and Human Performance Track within the Program in Human Biology and teaches several undergraduate courses.
	Victor Froelicher, MD – Cardiologist Consultant – After fellowship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, at the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, Dr Froelicher published numerous works related to exercise physiology and early screening for coronary artery disease. While at the UCSD, he was the principal investigator of a NIH randomized trial of cardiac rehabilitation (PERFEXT). Later he was the PI of a VA cooperative multicenter study of exercise testing and angiography called QUEXTA.
	Gannon Sungar – Laboratory Manager – Gannon graduated from Dartmouth College in 2002 with a degree in biology. Since that time he has worked in business and technology consulting and overseas with an international humanitarian foundation. Gannon's interests are in both physiology and biomechanics and he is currently pursuing a career in medicine.