NEWS

The next lecture in the President’s Leadership Colloquium will feature Dr. Kevin Stone of the Stone Research Foundation, who will speak from 1:30-2:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 21 in Wyly Auditorium.

The President’s Leadership Colloquium lecture is free.

The event will feature Stone, a surgeon whose clinical work is focused on repairing and replacing meniscus, articular cartilage, and ligaments to keep people active, and whose Stone Research Foundation is focused on studies mainly concentrated on cures for arthritis and techniques to speed the return of athletes to sports.

Stone will meet with selected faculty and students and tour some of Tech’s labs and facilities Friday morning, then present at the President’s Leadership Colloquium.

“We are delighted to host a health practitioner and scientist of such high caliber on our campus,” said Tech Associate Vice President for Research and Partnerships Dr. Sumeet Dua. “We are excited to explore collaborative opportunities in both basic and applied research with Dr. Stone and his Foundation. Tech’s capabilities in biomedical, allied health, biological, and computational domains are complementary to Dr. Stone’s goals to provide transformative and multidisciplinary clinical interventions to his patients.”

Friday’s visit began with the injured knee of Tech 1978 economics graduate and loyal University supporter Tom O’Neal.

O’Neal had been bothered by his knee for a while and did “the guy thing,” he said, by ignoring it as long as he could. But his friend and fellow Tech alum and University supporter Mike Jones (education, ’80), O’Neal said, had done much research before going to California to have Stone perform a good-as-new partial replacement of his knee.

Jones highly recommended that O’Neal and his knee head to San Francisco, which is exactly what O’Neal did.

“One of his main goals is for you to keep what God gave you,” said O’Neal of Stone, who fixed O’Neal’s tearing meniscus with some trimming, then cleaned up a shoulder he’d injured long ago.

“Soon I was back to doing everything I’d been doing before I had the surgery,” O’Neal said.

When Stone asked O’Neal to sit on the board of his research foundation. O’Neal accepted.

“I began to learn more about the type of research Kevin’s doing in areas of arthritis and surgical techniques and a whole range of things,” he said. “I told him we have a pretty good research university in north Louisiana and could probably do some of this for him.

“My thinking was to get a cutting-edge guy like Stone to collaborate with the smart people from our University, let these high IQ types talk about their research and what we might be able to do together.”

A challenge will be to find funding for specialized research. But the payoff will be increased knowledge, and if research turns up something commercially viable, the Foundation wins, Tech wins, the economy wins, and people disabled or slowed by arthritis or bad joints or a host of other orthopedic ailments win.

More information about Stone and his work:

• Kevin Stone is an orthopedic surgeon at The Stone and also the chairman of the Stone Research Foundation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_R._Stone)
• The Stone Clinic: https://www.stoneclinic.com
• Stone Research Foundation: http://www.stoneresearch.org
• A Ted Talk by Stone:  https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_stone_the_bio_future_of_joint_replacement