What is resilience? What is resilience engineering? This talk will ground your understanding of those terms using the compelling example of bone. Bone is the archetype of resilience and medicine the archetype of resilience engineering. The features of bone development, maintenance, and repair are graceful extensibility and sustained adaptability. They give the skeleton its capacity to grow, to retain strength, to remodel in the face of stress, and to repair damage. These are costly, effortful, energy requiring activities that are strike a fine balance between competing demands. We have learned – with great effort and much experimentation – how to anticipate and channel these features to benefit individuals. More recently, discoveries about how bone resilience remodeling is guided have provided opportunities to modulate some resilience signals directly. Everything about bone commends it to this community as the primary example of resilience and resilience engineering.

Dr. Richard Cook is a Principal with Adaptive Capacity Labs and Research Scientist in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering at The Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus, Ohio. He is an