Marni Boppart’s approach to life and work is probably hereditary. Her father flew F-4 jets on low level reconnaissance wartime missions; she was an Air Force kid who grew up to be an Air Force officer.
“I was on airplanes since I was about two weeks old,” Boppart says with a laugh. “I was always exposed to the flying environment, so I love altitude.”
Boppart didn’t become a jet pilot, but she did serve in the Air Force as an aerospace physiologist, earned her free fall parachute jump wings, and has taken occasional forays into daredevil activities like hang gliding and repelling. But for Boppart, her time in the Air Force was more about science.
“I think that exercise research is fascinating because of the fact that we know there are these healthy, beneficial effects provided to skeletal muscle following exercise but we don’t know the process by which they occur. I enjoy getting my mind into the cell and seeing what is responsible for some of these changes.”
– Marni Boppart
“I took flying lessons and enjoyed my career in the Air Force, but my primary interest has always been in the biological sciences,” she said.“Becoming an aerospace physiologist was a nice way to balance my interests in adventure and the sciences.”
Boppart’s time in the Air Force served two other purposes that eventually led to her current position as a faculty member at Illinois and the Beckman Institute. While serving, she nurtured an interest in the science of exercise physiology and she also met her future husband, fellow professor and Beckman researcher Stephen Boppart.
“Stephen and I were a natural fit for each other because we are both kind of curious,” she said. “I knew that he was going on for his Ph.D. and I was interested in going on for my doctoral work as well.”
Earning her Sc.D. in Applied Anatomy and Physiology from Boston University, Boppart later did research at Harvard Medical School and was fortunate, she said, to land a post-doctoral position at the University of Illinois when Stephen joined the faculty here in 2000.
“We both have family here in the Midwest, and of course, this is one of the best engineering schools in the nation,” she said. “I got very lucky because there was a faculty member (Stephen Kaufman) in cellular and developmental biology who was doing work that I was very interested in, so I worked with him on and off for a total of six years.”
Boppart eventually became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health at Illinois and joined the Beckman Institute as a full-time faculty member in the Bioimaging Science and Technology group. Her research interests lie broadly in the field of exercise science, and include areas such as cellular biomechanics, cell signaling, and the role certain proteins can play in the protection of skeletal muscle from injury, disease, and aging.
“We are interested in understanding how muscle cells transmit mechanical forces into chemical signals that increase muscle integrity and structure and how these signals are involved in remodeling the tissue,” she said of her work.