The $5 million lead gift will unite scientists, engineers, clinicians, and performance experts in translating research into real-world results starting with Oregon's student-athletes and expanding to athletes at all skills and ages.
Longtime University of Oregon donors are giving $5 million to launch Peak Oregon - "Science at the summit of human performance" - a new, formal partnership between the university's academic and athletics programs. The initiative unites scientists, engineers, clinicians and performance experts in their efforts to prevent injury, speed recovery, and improve health across the lifespan - turning research into real-world outcomes that help athletes live healthier, longer lives.
Peak Oregon builds on the momentum of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance (see below), formally integrating expertise across performance and sport science, athletic medicine, regenerative medicine, biomechanics and data science into a single platform.
Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance
Five years ago, the University of Oregon was a founding member of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, a national initiative launched in partnership with philanthropists Clara Wu Tsai and Joe Tsai to study athletic performance, injury prevention, and injury recovery to discover the biological principles that govern optimum performance. Their investment connected research groups across the UO campus that had previously rarely worked together, including bioengineers in the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, human physiologists in the Bowerman Sports Science Center and sports scientists in the Marcus Mariota Sports Performance Center. With support from the Wu Tsai Foundation and other private donors, research teams across academics and athletics have converged to build better tools for regeneration after injury, engineer soccer cleats that reduce ACL tear risk in female athletes and explore how heat training can improve runners' performance, among other areas.
"This gift creates a fully integrated precision performance platform, which will allow us to unlock insights that prevent injury, accelerate recovery and cement Oregon's national leadership in performance science and innovation."
UO Athletics has long been a pioneer in improving the performance of its student athletes - sports scientists have been collecting performance data and producing applied peer-reviewed research since the Marcus Mariota Sports Performance Center opened in 2016 - and well before then the department has been an innovator in sports performance. Peak Oregon will deepen those efforts to maximize the physical development, availability and return-to-play processes for UO student-athletes, emboldening Oregon's effort to improve student-athlete availability, identify injury risk earlier, practice a data-informed approach to injury prevention, and tailor rehabilitation and return-to-play plans to each individual athlete.
"This partnership represents another tremendous commitment to University of Oregon student-athletes, and Peak Oregon takes our sport science efforts to the next level. Collaboration by placing sport science staff alongside researchers at the Knight Campus and the Bowerman Sports Science Center will lead to greater insights on maximizing performance and reducing injury risk for Duck student-athletes. The work conducted through Peak Oregon also has the potential to help athletes at every level and Oregonians of every age live healthier and more active lives."
Ben McKay, director of Performance and Sport Science for Oregon Athletics, said the launch of Peak Oregon was coming at an opportune time.
"This new partnership captures a moment in which athletes, generally, and UO student-athletes, specifically, are enthusiastically engaged in research questions that will inform their performance, recovery, and injury prevention," he said.
"A recent study in UO Athletics taking ultrasound images of athletes' calf muscles as a baseline for training and injury prevention had a line out the door," McKay adds. "(We're) creating a culture and environment for practitioners across domains - like medical, strength and conditioning, and nutrition - to contribute to performance innovation and excellence."
To translate research findings to the broader population - of developing athletes, casual athletes, aging athletes - researchers across bioengineering and human physiology will use biobank samples to build performance organoids, which are engineered microtissues of bone, cartilage, tendon and muscle, to test new therapies and training protocols. In the future, these organoids could be personalized to individual athletes, allowing researchers to recreate an athlete's specific injury environment and test recovery strategies in real time. This is expected to provide rare, longitudinal datasets on elite performance, and a path toward precision performance medicine, where recovery and treatment are tailored to the individual rather than averaged across populations.
"Our biggest breakthroughs happen when researchers and trainers find ways to work together. Peak Oregon will speed up our ability to move a promising finding from the lab to a tool an athletic trainer can use on the field."
Peak Oregon will be headquartered in the "middle ground" - in Building 2 of the Knight Campus, which sits squarely between Hayward Field and Autzen Stadium and houses Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance at Oregon labs. This initiative will provide funding for interdisciplinary research projects that directly address athlete training and injury challenges across and between academic and athletic units that rarely otherwise have the opportunity to partner.
"We are grateful for the chance to support an initiative with the potential to redefine how we understand performance, recovery and optimal health for generations to come," said the longtime UO donors who are launching Peak Oregon and are choosing to remain anonymous. "We will enjoy watching this partnership across academics and athletics at UO develop and grow and are hopeful this will not only support Oregon's athletes but lead to meaningful outcomes for everyday athletes and communities - helping all people live healthier, longer lives."
