Assistant professor Troy Hornberger was named a Vilas Associate by the Graduate School at the University of the Wisconsin-Madison for 2012 and 2013. The awards are open to Assistant, Associate and Full Professors up to 20 years past tenure.  This award recognizes a faculty member’s scholarly achievements as well as the high quality of the research study proposed for the two-year period of support provided by the award.

Hornberger’s research interest is to determine how skeletal muscles sense mechanical information and convert this stimulus into the molecular events that regulate changes in muscle mass.  An understanding of these mechanisms will help prevent the muscle loss (atrophy) that accompanies old age and many disease states.