George Christ is not the kind of person to hang back and work on a portion of a puzzle. Christ, a professor of biomedical engineering and orthopedic surgery at the University of Virginia, is drawn to tackling large challenges in his field and completing them as quickly as possible — especially because his work in regenerative medicine has the potential to transform the lives of soldiers and accident victims incapacitated by massive muscle injury. It is because of the breadth of his vision that the U.S. Department of Defense awarded him a prestigious AFIRM III grant from the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine to develop solutions to devastating muscle loss injuries.