Max Lavaill: "Everyone Studies The Knee Because It's Simple"

Max Lavaill says the quiet part out loud a few minutes in. Researchers gravitate to the knee and the hip because those joints are simple, a hinge with one or two degrees of freedom. The shoulder has enormous range of motion and enormous potential instability, which is exactly why so few people have studied it properly, and exactly why he chose it. Max is a French biomechanist doing a postdoctoral fellowship at Queensland University of Technology. He grew up in Châlons en Champagne, the son of two GPs, and came to Australia after a holiday in 2017 convinced him Brisbane was where he wanted to be. He opens up the machinery of academic research in a way researchers rarely do publicly. He explains musculoskeletal modelling, the h index, why impact factors multiply the value of a citation, and why he thinks the entire metric is distorting science. He is equally candid about grant funding. His Advanced Queensland Fellowship was worth $160,000 towards a $400,000 project. The application took two months of his life across roughly fifteen drafts, and he might have got nothing. Without a grant, a postdoc is unemployed. The current project is scapular dyskinesis, where the literature still cannot agree whether it is a cause or a consequence, and where he is chasing sub millimetre accuracy in tracking a bone buried under muscle and fat.