Callan Luetkemeyer is a solid mechanician developing microstructure-informed mechanical imaging techniques to “see” the cellular microenvironment of soft tissues – especially when light, sound, or magnetic resonance alone fall short.

As a PhD student at the University of Michigan, Callan planned to study anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries using in silico models. However, she soon recognized that existing methods for modeling ACL mechanical properties lacked sufficient accuracy due to invalid assumptions of deformation homogeneity. To address this, she pioneered an approach that combined displacement imaging and full-field computational inverse methods with microstructure-informed material modeling. Her work became the first to detect specific differences in soft tissue micro-architecture using millimeter-scale deformation alone.

As a Schmidt Science Fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder, Callan pivoted into extracellular matrix biology to gain a deeper understanding of tissue microstructure. There, she developed image-based methods to define tissue “injury criteria” – tissue-scale mechanical thresholds for molecular-scale collagen denaturation – analogous to yield criteria.

Now an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign, Callan leads a lab developing pathology-specific mechano-biomarkers and full-field mechanical inference frameworks. Her goal is to enable non-invasive, mechanics-based diagnostic imaging tailored to the unique mechanical signatures of different tissues and diseases.