"The ERVA effort is a truly transformative opportunity to integrate innovative and diverse engineering and science approaches to address our nation's grand challenges."
William S. Marras holds the Honda Chair in Integrated Systems Engineering and serves as the director of the Spine Research Institute at The Ohio State University. Marras holds joint academic appointments in the departments of orthopaedic surgery, neurosurgery, and the physical medicine and rehabilitation. His research is centered on understanding multidimensional causal pathways for spine disorders through quantitative epidemiologic evaluations, laboratory biomechanical studies, personalized mathematical modeling, and clinical studies of the lumbar and cervical spine. His findings have been published in more than 300 peer-reviewed journal articles, hundreds of refereed proceedings, and numerous books and book chapters, including a book entitled The Working Back: A Systems View.
Marras has been active on the National Research Council, having served on more than a dozen boards and committees and he has served as chair of the Board on Human Systems Integration for multiple terms. He has also served as editor-in-chief of Human Factors and is currently deputy editor of Spine. Marras is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, recorded a TEDx talk entitled “Back Pain and your Brain,” and has been featured on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”