Joint Effort: Theresa Haupt '24 Studies Knee Implants in Australia

Total knee replacement is one of the most common bone surgeries performed worldwide, second only to hip replacement. Typically, most patients are over the age of 60, but an increasing number of young people whose joints have been impacted by injury or osteoarthritis are seeking out the procedure. While the aggressive surgery can restore movement and alleviate pain, artificial knees have a typical lifespan of about 20 years, posing a challenge for those who receive them at a younger age. 

Addressing that growing challenge is the focus of the next chapter for Theresa Haupt ’24, who, from a young age, has been interested in how people move and how she might help them move more efficiently. Through her recently awarded Fulbright Scholarship, Haupt will head to Australia later this year to work at a gait lab overseen by professors David Ackland and Peter Lee, a center for biomedical research at the University of Melbourne. 

The lab currently studies hips, rotator cuffs, and jaw joints, but Haupt hopes to shift the focus to knees. In Melbourne, Haupt will join a team that studies how artificial joints function during everyday movements, such as walking, running, and jumping. Assisted by motion capture cameras, sophisticated X-ray technology, and 3D gait analysis, she’ll help identify where wear happens most frequently and what causes implant failures to occur. 

“I'll be looking at the kinematics—the motion and movement of knees—in osteoarthritic patients and studying how movement is impacted after total knee replacement surgery,” Haupt, who was a chemistry major at Haverford, says. “We’ll be looking at the before and after effects of the implant with the long-term goal of understanding how we can improve implant technologies and make them more durable for younger patients.”

Haupt’s interest in medical technology began during her childhood, across numerous trips to visit her grandfather, a Vietnam War Navy veteran, at the Northport Veterans Affairs Hospital on Long Island, New York. “I had conversations with amputees, stroke victims, and patients recovering from recent implant surgeries,” she recalls. “They often expressed frustrations with the inability to perform simple tasks, such as eating and answering the phone, and sought tools to become more mobile. I found myself leaving these visits wondering how I could help.”

The questions that experience presented to her coalesced into a keen interest in bioengineering in high school. She remembers designing an adjustable shelf for her peers who couldn’t reach the top of their lockers. When one of her teammates had struggled to rehab a pulled hamstring, she developed a temperature variable roller for muscle therapy. An extended essay she penned for International Baccalaureate focused on the pros and cons of running blades for paralympic runners. 

During her junior year at Haverford, Haupt landed an internship at MedEast, a Delaware Valley-based prosthetics and orthotics company. After shadowing its clinicians for a time, Haupt eventually became part of a team that 3D printed prosthetic fingers and scanned anatomical limbs for prosthetic leg covers. Interacting with patients took her back to Veterans Affairs, but this time with a solution: a finger that could be used to open the office door. Haupt keeps a first print of that finger, and a pin given to her by her grandfather, on her desk as a reminder of the impact she hopes to make. 

After completing an accelerated master’s program in bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania in May, Haupt had accepted an offer to enroll in a Ph.D. program at the University of Utah, but she’s opted to defer for now until her Fulbright experience concludes. 

As she looks ahead, Haupt, a longtime athlete who played goalkeeper at Haverford and is currently training for a 30-mile ultramarathon, hopes her work will help people, particularly veterans and athletes, return to activities that are central to their identities. In Australia, she hopes to learn more about the country’s culture through the lens of athletics. 

“You can learn a lot about a person just by talking to them on a run,” she says, “or learn a lot about a culture by interacting with the sports they value and their sporting culture in general.” 

Haupt is one of five Fords to be accepted into the prestigious Fulbright program for the 2025-2026 academic year. Learn more about their plans.