Soccer players, biomedical engineers

Mike Kubik and Zach Galluzzo have a unique perspective on how soccer players work.

Not just on how a soccer team works per se.

No - they know how soccer players physically work. How the muscles, ligaments, and bones in the knees and hips work.

The insight doesn’t come from the over 100 combined games the seniors have played for the Binghamton University men’s soccer team.

Both Kubik and Galluzzo are biomedical engineering (BME) majors within the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science.

“Since we see how a body works there is some more appreciation for injuries and the training that we do,” Galluzzo said. “The weird part is when you do get hurt and you go into the doctor’s office and you think all of the equipment is really cool. I have caught myself more into the machines than into getting treatment done.”

Kubik came to Binghamton from Wallington, N.J. His father left Poland in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. After his dad got established in the borough just outside of New York City, Kubik’s mom came stateside. The Bearcat midfielder holds dual Polish and American citizenship.

Galluzzo jokes that his journey to campus is, “a lot more common since it seems like everyone here is from Long Island.” He is from Ronkonkoma near Islip.

Through the beginning of October, the Binghamton men’s soccer team was 5-2-5 (W-L-T) on the season including a 3-0 upset of the University at Buffalo on Homecoming weekend. Binghamton tied No. 19 UMass-Lowell in their America East Conference opener, 1-1, and was highly ranked in regional polls.

Kubik has been sidelined with a sports hernia injury all season long after starting every game last year as a midfielder. Galluzzo, a defensive back, has started every game for Binghamton so far and scored in a 2-0 win over Manhattan on Sept. 5. He has scored six goals during his Binghamton career, but most of the time the 2015 First-Team All-America East selection is tasked with keeping opponents off the score sheet. Binghamton had shut out five opponents this season already by the start of league play.

Not getting on the pitch and not scoring once there can be mentally tough for any player to deal with. However, the cerebral calluses formed have actually helped both excel in the classroom.

“When you play midfield or defense there are times that you run and run and run and there isn’t the tangible satisfaction of a goal or a save to point to at the end of a match, but if the team wins you know you contributed,” Galluzzo said. “It is similar to the kind of projects and work that we do for BME. There are a lot of hours spent reading and finding pieces of information that aren’t necessarily a direct part of the final product, but you have to be mentally tough enough to keep doing those kind of things because, without them, a project goes nowhere.”

Academically, both are concentrating on biomaterials and have been fixtures on the Binghamton Athletic Director’s Honor Roll (3.3 GPA or better) and America East Honor Roll (3.0 GPA or better). Beyond GPAs, both have been inducted into the National College Athlete Honor Society and the Alpha Eta Mu Beta Biomedical Engineering Honor Society. Finally, both are in the 4+1 BS/MS program in the Watson School. They will stay at Binghamton for five years and leave with both undergraduate and advanced degrees.

“Mike and Zach are the kinds of students that embrace, and rise to, the challenge of the Biomedical Engineering Department, the Watson School, and Binghamton University as a whole,” said Professor Kaiming Ye, chair of the Biomedical Engineering Department. “They are committed to athletics, of course, but they have taken on the challenge of their academic discipline and thrived. I am proud of them and they are both great examples of what is possible here at Binghamton.”

Much of Kubik and Galluzzo’s academic work has focused on studying research and theory instead of hands-on work in the field, but that is changing.

For their senior design project - all Watson seniors work on one - the pair is working with classmates Joseph Carnicelli, Melissa Sharkey, and Brandon Ashley on the second stage of development for a device that will help prevent hip fractures in at-risk elderly patients.

“The mortality rate of elderly patients within a year of fracturing a hip is very high,” Kubik said. “There is also the potential that this project could be integrated into athletics. The biomechanics aspect of the project really enticed us.”

Annually, millions of adults over 65 fall; it is a leading cause of fatal and non-fatal injury. About 95 percent of those injuries are hip fractures, with all of sorts of painful and costly aftermath.

An initial prototype of the device was designed last academic year, but Kubik, Galluzzo and the rest of the group have been working on updates that call for a wearable device designed to redistribute the force of a fall away from the underlying hip bone. The device adheres to a patient’s skin and is waterproof; the final design and fabrication is scheduled for spring 2017.

“The biggest connection between soccer and BME are on projects like this,” Kubik said. “Both are truly about a team. On the field we need everyone getting jobs done and sometimes even more in order to hoist a sweet trophy at the end of the year. For our project, sure we are working on it, but there is a team of five people that are getting everything done to make it successful. If each of us does our part, and maybe a little bit more, then we could have a project that helps a lot of people someday and makes a lot of lives better.”

So, they do have some insight on how teams work too.