The UCSF Department of Orthopaedic Surgery is pleased to announce the appointment of Jeannie F. Bailey, PhD, Assistant Professor
Jeannie Bailey, PhD, has more than a decade of interdisciplinary research experience in orthopaedic health outcomes focused on lumbar spinal conditions and low back pain. Her research explores novel methods for identifying clinical-relevant biomechanical phenotypes and exploring potential interactive mechanisms between separate low back pain phenotypes. The impact of her research on spine health is wide-ranging, from exploring the ambiguity of causal features of non-specific chronic low back pain to creating novel approaches for assessing sagittal alignment in adult spinal deformity patients.
She has experience leading prospective low back pain cohort studies, beginning with a multi-year longitudinal study tracking spinal health in NASA astronauts before and after 6-months spaceflight. From this work, she was awarded the 2017 Outstanding Paper award from the North American Spine Society for illuminating mechanistic relationships between spinal biomechanics, muscle health, and underlying spinal pathology for predicting risk for developing chronic low back pain after spaceflight. She has since confirmed similar mechanistic relationships between paraspinal muscle health and endplate pathology in a prospective study exploring imaging phenotypes in a cohort of chronic low back pain patients. She is beginning to explore associations between hip stabilizing muscle quality and long-term biomechanical outcomes in transfemoral amputation patients.
She has valuable experience developing, testing, and deploying precision-based digital health technology to enhance both clinician and patient engagement in treatment and recovery. She recently led a randomized control trial of a digital therapy on chronic low back pain and uncovered the positive impacts of patient engaging technology on adhering patients to conservative care and improved patient-reported outcomes, ideally mitigating the need for opioids or surgery. As a UCSF CTSI Precision Health Fellow (TL1) she collaborated with an interdisciplinary team of engineers and clinicians to develop 3-dimensional depth mapping technology for in-clinic motion assessments. This work awarded them the 2019 ISSLS Prize in Bioengineering Science, where they introduced novel biomechanical outcomes for spine patients and the potential for predicting risk for post-surgical failure. She aims to further develop technology that will capture functional phenotypes from real world data that correspond to phenotypic mechanisms derived from imaging and in-clinical assessments.
Dr. Bailey received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and her master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Washington. She performed post-doctorate research at UCSF in the Dept. of Orthopaedic Surgery.
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