Assistant Professor Heidi Ploeg credits fate for influencing most of the important decisions she has made in her personal and professional life.

Born and raised in Ottawa, Ontario, Ploeg completed he BS, MS and PhD, all in mechanical engineering at Queen's University. Ploeg's first brush with fate was a lost job opportunity with a Canadian mountain bike company. They told her she "didn't have mountain bike racing experience." The rejection turned her onto one of her many passions: amateur road bike racing.

Ask Ploeg's students what her obsessions are and they will invariably answer, "cycling." Ploeg not only competes in amateur road cycling races, she also bikes seven miles to work each day.

"It's good to get off the addiction of cars and driving to work and parking," she says.

Assistant Professor Heidi Ploeg is one of the newest additions to the College of Engineering.

At work she uses her bike to physically represent what she is teaching her students. It isn't surprising to walk by her classroom and see her on top of her bike showing students how to "find forces and stresses in the bicycle and its components."

Before Ploeg came to Madison she lived in Switzerland for ten years. She worked at Centerpulse Orthopedics, a company specializing in bone and joint biomechanics. Ploeg attributes her concentration in biomechanics to fate, because her university advisor specialized in the same subject. Her advisor became a mentor and helped her decide to focus in biomechanics.

"It is because of him that I got my position in Switzerland and really became a specialist in that field," Ploeg says.

During her time at Centerpulse Orthopedics, Ploeg was a senior member of the research department. She says the most rewarding project with the company was reconstructing a hip for a retired veterinarian. What made this case so special was that the team actually personally worked with the patient, a rarity in biomechanics.

While in Switzerland, Ploeg also worked with many student interns and realized that she might "like to go back to the university as a professor."

After ten years in Switzerland, Ploeg was ready to "speak English again" and decided to follow her partner to Middleton, Wisconsin.

Ploeg had started her job search very broadly when fate stepped in again. An initial search of the university's engineering program did not produce any hopeful positions, so she continued to look elsewhere.

After a thorough search of North America, she found an opening in her field at UW-Madison. Ploeg immediately handed in her resume in person, which was a great surprise considering the university had been searching all over the world for such a perfect applicant. This is just another example of what she calls "coincidence and really good fate."

Ploeg became a faculty member in 2003. She now spends her time teaching and working as head researcher in the Bone and Joint Biomechanics Lab.

Ploeg hopes to be a tenured professor at UW-Madison in five years.

Another one of her goals is to develop a reputation in the U.S. research community to add to her list of accomplishments in Europe and Canada. In the near future, she would also like to help out with the new human powered vehicles team in the mechanical engineering department. She feels that working with the team could be an ultimate experience in joining her two loves: cycling and engineering. It will be interesting to see where fate takes Heidi Ploeg next.