Dr. Courtney Cox received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University, after earning her B.S.E. also in Biomedical Engineering from Mercer University.  Her graduate coursework and research focused on injury biomechanics, specifically that of the human spine.

Dr. Cox’s expertise is in the injury tolerance and sex-based differences in the lumbar spine.  She has conducted extensive research into the importance of musculature during dynamic loading conditions. Her experimental and computational research areas include head, neck, and lumbar spine biomechanics for automotive and military loading conditions. Her projects range from material characterization of human tissue to the effects of head-supported mass on neck loads.

She has also been involved in the testing of anthropometric test devices (ATDs) and development of computational models of the human spine. Dr. Cox has presented her research at both domestic and international professional conferences.  She is published in peer-reviewed journals such as Traffic Injury Prevention.

• Biomedical Engineering, Ph.D.: Duke University (2020)
· Dissertation: Computational Modeling of the Lumbar Spine: Active Musculature and Intra-Abdominal Pressure in Compressive Loading

• Graduate courses: biomedical aspects of blasts and ballistics, body and brain I, experiment design and statistics, finite element method, intermediate dynamics, musculation on neck response, spinal injury biomechanics, tissue biomechanics, vehicle safety engineering, viscoelastic biomechanics

• Biomedical Engineering, M.S.: Duke University (2015)
· Research Project: Cervical Spine Response to Underbody Blast Loading

• Biomedical Engineering, B.S.E.: Mercer University (2011)
· Minor: Business Administration
· Summa cum laude

• Memberships: Biomedical Engineering Society; Society of Automotive Engineers

• Honors: Whitaker International Program Summer Grantee, 2014; IRCOBI Asia Travel Grant, IRCOBI Asia 2014; The Guerry C. Backer Memorial Scholarship, 2010; Undergraduate Research Fellow, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009