David Cooper is continuing his research on bone health at Canada’s national synchrotron facility in Saskatoon. (Photo courtesy of the University of Saskatchewan)
We all have them and some of us have even broken one or two. Alumnus David Cooper, PhD’06, is studying how to keep our bones healthy. More specifically, he’s interested in the aging of bones and its effect on diseases such as osteoporosis, which affects one in four women over 50 and one in eight men over 50 in Canada.
“There’s a huge health impact to understanding how bones develop and age, and ultimately how they get diseases,” says Cooper, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Synchrotron Bone Imaging.
As an undergraduate, Cooper studied paleobiology and became interested in forensics. As a PhD student at the University of Calgary, he combined medical science imaging technology with archaeology while completing an interdisciplinary PhD in medicine and social science.
Using high resolution imaging to study the internal microscopic structure of bones, Cooper helped take the study of osteoporosis in a new direction.
Now working at the University of Saskatchewan, he’s using a facility called a synchrotron, a particle accelerator that generates intense light, which is used to produce highly detailed, 3D images of bones. He’s using this technology at the Canadian Light Source—Canada’s national synchrotron facility in Saskatoon that uses beams of light of up to one million times greater than the sun.
This state-of-the-art research is building on the work he did at the University of Calgary where he used the most advanced imaging technology available at the time.
“The University of Calgary has a great external reputation,” says Cooper. “It was clear from the start that the intent of the university was to be an international player and to participate on an international stage. Calgary was a competitive place and I wanted to be a part of that.”
Cooper says his Calgary PhD supervisors, Benedikt Hallgrimsson in medicine and Anne Katzenburg in archaeology, led by example and that he is striving to emulate that in his everyday work.
“David is forging a new area of research and he did this from the time he was a graduate student,” says Hallgrimsson. “He had a vision and he pursued it relentlessly. He works hard, but more importantly, he works intelligently.”
Hallgrimsson says Cooper didn’t always take the direct route many people would have in his research, and this is an attribute that has led him to succeed.
“Often I would ask him to do one thing and he’d do the opposite because he had a plan and was following it. In the end he was usually (but not always) right—I think this is one of the hallmarks of a leader.”
