REACH Researchers
Dr. Lara Thompson
Principal Investigator
Brief bio:
In Fall of 2025, Lara Thompson joined UMass Lowell as a full Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and soon thereafter, she initiated the REACH group.
A native to the Boston area, Professor Thompson earned her Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from UMass Lowell. She then went on to pursue a Master of Science in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at Stanford University. After working for over two years at Charles Stark Draper Laboratory as a mechanical engineer, she pursued and obtained her doctoral degree from the Harvard - Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) in Biomedical Engineering.
Prior to joining UMass Lowell, she was a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and was the founding director of the Biomedical Engineering program (the first ABET-accredited Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering program at a historically black college and university (HBCU)) and the Center for Biomechanical & Rehabilitation Engineering (CBRE) (a state-of-the-art research facility focused on human mobility) at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) in Washington, DC were she served for 12 years after her Ph.D. As the sole principal investigator of a National Institutes of Health C06 grant, she led the design of a new, expansive, multi-laboratory facility (a specialized center for assistive rehabilitation research) aimed to focus on gait and balance, assistive robotics, virtual reality and biomechanics.
Photos by Ed Brennen
An unconventional route:
As a youngster, Prof. Thompson was creative, eager, interested and always wanting to take things apart or put them together. Unconventional and passionate, the creativity, perseverance, compassion, and ability stick to difficult problems, and to view and solve them in an abstract way, throughout her various life experiences in sports, music, academics, and beyond, led Dr. Thompson to become a professor, currently serving at her alma mater.
Dr. Lara Thompson, Ph.D.
Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Associate Chair Undergraduate Program
PI of REACH group
Awards:
In addition to being a thoughtful educator, Dr. Thompson is an award winning researcher. During her first spring as a professor at UMass Lowell, Prof. Thompson was inducted as a 2026 American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Fellow in Washington, DC. AIMBE fellowship supposedly denotes our Nation's top 2% of biomedical engineers. Within the last decade she has been recognized with several awards: Blavatnik Award Nominee 2023, BEYA STEM Innovator 2019, and Diverse Issues in Higher Education Emerging Scholar 2017. However most prestigious honor thus far was the Alan T. Waterman Award in 2022. The Waterman Award is very prestigious in that it is our nation’s top honor for early career scientists and engineers less than 40 years old. Since the Waterman Award's inception in 1975, Prof. Thompson is the first awardee from a HBCU and first self-identified female of color recipient.