Editors’ Note: This feature appears as it was published in the spring 2018 edition of UT Dallas Magazine. Titles or faculty members listed may have changed since that time.
A former student-athlete-turned-engineer is now working to improve the lives of other athletes.
Jonathan Reeder BS’12, PhD’16 is a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University where he develops soft, flexible sweat collection systems for athletic performance monitoring.
He visited the Chicago Cubs baseball team to test out some of his devices during spring training in 2017.
“I didn’t think baseball at UT Dallas would later lead to working with professional athletes, and certainly not as an engineer to measure the sweat of these athletes to inform them about their performance and health,” Reeder said. “My journey really has come full circle.”
As an undergraduate, Reeder could be found in one of two places: the research lab or the baseball field.
Reeder, a tall lefty with a decent fastball, won three games and contributed as a middle reliever for the Comets.
After graduating in 2012 as one of five students in the first class of mechanical engineering students, Reeder hung up his baseball mitt for a lab coat and decided to pursue a PhD in materials science and engineering.
The inspiration to continue in academia came from working with Dr. Walter Voit BS’05, MS’06, associate professor of materials science and engineering and mechanical engineering.
“Before taking Voit’s undergraduate class, I was not even interested in research,” Reeder said.
