Editor’s Note: The following remarks — lightly edited for publication — were delivered by Professor Emerita Carolee Winstein recently at the Provoking the Future: Rethinking Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation, a day-long seminar celebrating the accomplishments of retiring faculty members, Kornelia Kulig and Rob Landel. As part of the celebration, the Division has launched a fundraising campaign to help establish the USC PT Kulig-Landel Musculoskeletal Fund, an endowed scholarship in honor of these two physical therapy juggernauts. 

BY CAROLEE WINSTEIN, PROFESSOR EMERITA

I HAVE TWO GOALS for my introductory remarks:

First, to honor these two extraordinary individuals upon their retirement — really, what I like to call “rewirement,” and acknowledge their immeasurable contributions to our Division, University, students and the profession of physical therapy.

Second, to set the stage for this forward-looking scientific symposium.

A few caveats, before I begin — I am not an expert in musculoskeletal rehabilitation. I came to USC in 1990 and, over my career in neurorehabilitation, I was able to witness the impact these two individuals had because of their vision, passion and perseverance with cautious optimism that their vision could be realized. While I am not an expert in musculoskeletal rehabilitation, I did minor in biomechanics at UCLA during my PhD program that was focused on motor control and learning — an important component of musculoskeletal rehabilitation. Hopefully, that should give me some street cred in these circles.

Today, we celebrate Kornelia Kulig’s career — a career that has left an indelible mark on physical therapy, biomechanics research and the University of Southern California — a career that began not in Los Angeles, but in Poland, and that has traveled a remarkable arc to arrive at this moment.

Kornelia Kulig began her research career in 1976 and earned her doctoral degree in biomechanics in 1982. She originally studied sports biomechanics — how to coax athletes into performing faster, better and stronger. That early formation never left her — as evidenced by her yearly insistence that each of her friends perform some athletic feat (scaling nearby mountains, bicycling around the Rose Bowl X times around — with X equaling your age [cleverly disguised as kilometers]) to celebrate your birthday. Even decades later, when the questions shifted from peak performance to persistent pain, the underlying curiosity — about what the body does, why it does it and how we might help — remained exactly the same.

When she came to the United States, she worked as a postdoctoral scholar with Jim Hay, founder of the American Society of Biomechanics at the University of Iowa. From that foundation, she discovered physical therapy, and she joined the two fields together in a way that neither had quite seen before.

At USC, Kornelia built a research program that was always, as she has described it, clinically motivated and experimentally tested. Over the past 20 years, her lab has studied difficult problems: people who have recurrent symptoms — low back pain, tendon pain, conditions that ripple through their lives throughout the year. Her work examined how pain can leave a footprint on how people move and use their bodies, even when the pain itself is absent. That insight — that the ghost of pain shapes movement long after the acute episode resolves — is a contribution with profound implications for how we assess and treat patients.

Her research programs read like a masterclass in clinical relevance. With colleagues, including collaborator Rob Landel, she pioneered the use of dynamic MRI to study lumbar spine kinematics during manual therapy — asking, in real time and in vivo, what actually happens to vertebral segments when a clinician applies a posterior-to-anterior force.

The answer changed how the field thinks about spinal mobilization. Her tendinopathy program was equally groundbreaking. In collaboration with her PhD student Shruti Arya, they were the first to determine that degenerated tendons are more compliant, laying the foundation for resistive exercise as the essential ingredient in managing degenerative tendinopathies. Her randomized controlled trial on the nonsurgical management of posterior tibial tendon dysfunction, comparing orthoses, concentric exercise and eccentric exercise, gave clinicians an evidence base for a condition that had long been managed by intuition, alone. And her work on patellar tendinopathy — advancing understanding of “jumper’s knee” through research with USC volleyball players — brought the science of tendon adaptation directly to the athletes who needed it most. She even extended this work to dancers, studying the biomechanics of the grand jeté (an iconic ballet leap), the flexor hallucis longus and the beautiful, demanding mechanics of performance art — research that tapped into, as she put it, “the beauty of expression of human emotion.”

The students and collaborators who passed through her Musculoskeletal Biomechanics Research Laboratory carry her intellectual fingerprints everywhere. George Beneck, now at Cal State Long Beach; Yu-Jen Chang at West Virginia University; Jo Armour Smith at Chapman University; Kimiko Yamada, here at USC; John Popovich; Danielle Jarvis; Abbigail Fietzer; Michael Rowley; and Shruti Arya. The list goes on — a generation of movement scientists shaped by her insistence on asking the right question, doing the experiment rigorously and never settling for a clean answer when the biology was still complicated.

Her recognition has been commensurate with her contributions. She received the Dorothy E. Baethke–Eleanor J. Carlin Award for Excellence in Academic Teaching, the James Gould Outstanding Teacher Award from the Orthopedic Section of the APTA, and the Excellence in Research Award from the California Physical Therapy Association. And most recently, the American Physical Therapy Association recognized her with the 2024 Career in Excellence in Biomechanics Research Award — bestowed annually on a biomechanics expert who has made an important scholarly contribution and lasting impact on the profession. When she received that news, she said it was meaningful “especially from a group of colleagues who have the same passions and the same interests” — a characteristically generous framing that put the community ahead of herself.

In her 2013 Maley Lecture, she emphasized the need to translate knowledge gained in physical therapy school into clinical competence. Stating that clinical competence can only be attained by deliberate practice and rigorous examinations (like those with Dr. Jacquelin Perry). She dedicated her lecture to all who have been changed by the struggle and joy of learning.

Kornelia has expressed a passion for translating the applications of her work to international contexts, including Europe and Asia, so retirement for her will not mean retreat. It will mean reallocation — of curiosity, of energy and perhaps of geography.

Recently, in discussing PT education in the current climate, she said to me. “Making students happy is not enough.”

To her colleagues, her students, and the patients whose movement she spent a career trying to understand: Kornelia Kulig gave you her finest thinking. USC is a richer place for the years she spent here, and physical therapy is a stronger, more scientifically grounded profession because of the work she devoted her life to.

Kornelia — here’s to what’s next. You have more than earned it.

Rob Landel was hired at USC by acting chair, Lucinda Baker in 1988. So, Rob was already here when I (also hired by Lucinda Baker) arrived in 1990. There are clinicians, and there are educators, and there are researchers — and then, once in a rare while, there is someone who refuses to be confined to just one of those roles. Rob Landel is that person. Over a career spanning more than 35 years at the University of Southern California, Rob has embodied what it truly means to be a complete physical therapist: someone who treats with skill, teaches with passion and thinks with the precision of a scientist.

Rob didn’t just join USC — He had a vision. He built things here that will endure long after this celebration. He founded USC Physical Therapy Associates, the Division’s faculty practice (now simply called USC Physical Therapy), and the Division’s first residency program, the orthopedic residency program. Think about what that means: He looked around and saw gaps — in clinical training, in mentorship, in how the next generation of physical therapists would learn to reason — and he filled them. He served as director of the entry-level doctor of physical therapy program and director of the residency programs, shaping the structure within which hundreds of students came of age as clinicians.

And those students noticed. One former student captured it well, writing that Rob demonstrated “the utmost knowledge, passion and fairness” and that he “taught us life lessons” that carried beyond the clinic into every corner of their lives. He also served as the USC Physical Therapy Alumni Association’s first faculty advisor, bringing not only novel ideas to those meetings, but humor. That combination — rigor and humor — is Rob’s signature.

His scholarly contributions are equally impressive. Working alongside colleagues including Kornelia, Rob helped pioneer the use of dynamic MRI to understand what actually happens inside the spine during manual therapy. Their work examined lumbar spine kinematics during posterior-to-anterior mobilization, and studied segmental lumbar mobility in individuals with low back pain — in vivo, in real time. This wasn’t armchair theorizing. This was a clinician-scientist asking: Does what I do with my hands actually move what I think it moves? And then going and finding out. That combination of clinical curiosity and scientific rigor is rare, and it produced research that changed how orthopedic physical therapists think about spinal assessment and treatment.

His clinical reach extended far beyond the walls of USC. Rob has lectured and trained therapists and physicians across the United States, Asia, Europe, Australia and Africa — and, for more than 13 years, he served as physical therapist to the U.S. professional beach volleyball tour, the Association of Volleyball Professionals, including seven years on their medical advisory board. For someone whose personal passions include beach volleyball, skiing, snowboarding and body surfing, that was probably not the worst assignment he ever received.

The profession has recognized him accordingly. He received the James A. Gould Excellence in Teaching Orthopaedic Physical Therapy Award from the Orthopedic Section of the APTA, was named Teacher of the Year within the Division — twice — and received the Steven Rose Excellence in Research Award and the Royce P. Noland Award of Merit from the California Chapter of the APTA. These aren’t participation trophies. These are the votes of peers who watched him work and said: That is the standard.

Rob’s personal philosophy — “The older I get, the older ‘old’ gets.” — tells you everything you need to know about how he has approached his career and his life. With curiosity. With movement. With the refusal to settle.

To his colleagues — Kornelia, Chris and so many others who built something remarkable together in this Division — thank you for giving Rob the collaborators he deserved. And to Rob: Thank you for the patients you healed, the students you shaped, and the institution you built. The USC Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy is stronger, more rigorous and more human because of you.

Here’s to the next chapter — may it involve plenty of beach volleyball, a few mountains and the deep satisfaction of knowing the work you did here mattered.

Congratulations, Rob!