Silvia Blemker

Silvia Salinas Blemker is a Full Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on characterizing the structure and properties of muscle tissue through biomechanical modelling. She is the principal investigator of the Multiscale Muscle Mechanophysiology (M3) lab at the same university.

Additionally, she is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of Springbok Analytics, which focuses on analyzing MRI data of muscle tissue using AI. She is from Lawrence, Kansas.

In 2024, she was elected as a fellow within the National Academy of Inventors in recognition of her ability to turn research into useable tools and especially the work she is doing with Springbok Analytics in relation to the analysis MRIs using AI and her further research into using muscle disease biomarkers to improve diagnostics.

Industry career In 2013, Dr. Blemker co-founded Springbok Analytics. Springbok Analytics' mission is to make muscle health "understandable and actionable, empower clinicians, researchers, and performance professionals with precise muscle health insights" to support decision-making. Essentially Dr. Blemker and her team developed a repeatable, MRI-based method for tracking muscle health, quantifying individual muscle quality, fat infiltration, and symmetry, providing precise, actionable data at the individual muscle level. Dr. Blemker's research leverages experimental and computational models in interest to characterize relationships between muscle structure, biomechanical properties, biology, and function with the goal to develop new musculoskeletal disease treatments. Dr. Blemker runs the Multiscale Muscle Mechanophysiology ("M3") laboratory at the University of Virginia. The ultimate goal of this laboratory is to improve treatments and quality of life for individuals suffering from muscle-related clinical problems.