Our team has spent decades at the intersection of animal movement science, equine-assisted services, mathematics, and long-term practical experience with horses. In 2023 we launched the Systems Biomechanics of the Horse program at the University of Arizona, and in 2025 EquiPhysics was founded as an independent nonprofit to carry the work beyond a single university. In 2026, EquiPhysics received federal 501(c)(3) recognition.

Our first years, based at the historic Al-Marah Equine Center in Tucson, were a period of rapid experimentation. Courses in horsemanship and movement science, undergraduate research on movement and physiology, community symposia, sensor-based gait studies — we tried many things quickly, and that early work taught us which parts of the program were most valuable: the classroom examples, the datasets, the models, the students they reached — and the gentle daily measurement work with our own horses that feeds all of it. We owe warm thanks to the community that made those Al-Marah years what they were — especially Nancy Skocy, whose wisdom in equine-assisted services shaped the program’s early life. When the university announced the sale of the Al-Marah property in 2026, EquiPhysics moved to Sonoita, where the program horses now live at Rancho del Nido, an inspected partner facility.

The move sharpened our focus. Today’s EquiPhysics is built around what we learned works best: horse-centered mathematics education that any student can join from any classroom, and computational research that serves equine health.

We still share our days with horses. The program herd lives at Rancho del Nido, and working with them — measuring gait, heart, and breathing rhythms gently, in the course of ordinary handling and exercise — is where our research and our classroom datasets begin. Horse welfare is a constraint and a motivation for all of it: measurements are brief and noninvasive, using lightweight motion sensors and the same kind of heart-rate straps riders use every day, collected under university-approved animal-care protocols. And our long-term goal is to need those measurements less and less, as computational models take on more of the work.

EquiPhysics is governed by a volunteer board: Christina Hamlet, Siobhan Watkins, and Laura Miller.

We also know what our expertise is and isn’t. EquiPhysics brings mathematics, modeling, and measurement. Veterinarians, trainers, farriers, therapists, and lifelong horsepeople bring knowledge that no sensor captures. Some of the most interesting questions we work on are about exactly that pairing: when do quantitative measurement and experienced observation notice the same things — and when does each notice what the other can’t?