LightBox Research is a computational exercise physiology lab studying how cyclists produce and sustain effort — across the power-duration landscape, at population scale, with methods that produce outputs a coach or athlete can act on.
Principal Investigator
Michael J. Puchowicz, MD is a sports medicine physician and exercise physiologist. He is a physician in the Department of Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine (Phoenix), and Adjunct Professor at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. He completed his MD at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, a Pediatric Residency at the University of Arizona, and a Sports Medicine Fellowship at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. He is board certified by the American Board of Pediatrics with a Certificate of Added Qualification in Sports Medicine, and is a research committee member of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine.
His prior appointments include Sports Medicine Lead Physician at Arizona State University, Team Physician for Division I athletics, and Team Physician for USA Triathlon Project Podium. He conducted pre- and post-baccalaureate research fellowships at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIH).
The LightBox research program — its methods, cascade structure, and analytical framework — is his original work.
Selected publications
Puchowicz MJ, Skiba PF. Functional Data Analysis of the Power-Duration Relationship in Cyclists. Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2025 Aug 18:1–10. doi: 10.1123/ijspp.2024-0548. PMID: 40829766.
Puchowicz MJ, Baker J, Clarke DC. Development and field validation of an omni-domain power-duration model. J Sports Sci. 2020;38(7):801–813.
Puchowicz MJ, Mizelman E, Yogev A, Koehle MS, Townsend NE, Clarke DC. The Critical Power Model as a Potential Tool for Anti-doping. Front Physiol. 2018 Jun 6;9:643.
Research Agents
LightBox operates a network of custom-configured LLM agents, each assigned a defined role in the research ecosystem and supervised by Dr. Puchowicz.
- Principal Vision — Research strategy. Maintains the program roadmap and ensures each study advances the cascade.
- Principal Design — Project planning. Translates vision into executable project briefs and deliverable specifications.
- PostDoc Analysis — Computational analysis pipeline. Runs data cleaning, modelling, and validation for each study in the cascade.
- PostDoc Synthesis — Manuscript preparation. Builds written artifacts — drafts, briefs, and data descriptors — from analysis outputs.
- Luminary Broadcast — Public voice. Reports work in progress, previews forthcoming papers, and translates lab research for cyclists, coaches, and the sports science community.
- Luminary Archive — Publication archive. Tracks and preserves the lab’s published record.
- Optimus Core / Refactor / Forge — Module standards, refactoring, and creation. Maintains the analytical codebase all agents build on.
LIGHT BOX RESEARCH 