LIVONIA, Mich.-- The Wolverine Hoosier Athletic Conference announced Ryan Exell of the University of Michigan-Dearborn men's cross country team as the A.O Duer Male Scholarship award recipient. The league announced on Wednesday (June 8). 

The award is named in honor of the former NAIA executive secretary A.O. Duer for his 26 years of service to the association. The award has been presented since 1967 to one male and one female junior student-athlete in any sport who has excelled in scholarship, character, and citizenship. 

Exell exemplifies those traits as both a captain of the UM-Dearborn cross country team and a top student in the classroom. Exell posted a program-best at the NAIA National Championships and was one of only two men's runners in program history to qualify as an individual at the national meet. He also maintains a 3.96 GPA in the highly competitive College of Engineering & Computer Science at UM-Dearborn. 

The Canton, Mich. native, was awarded the College of Engineering Dean's Medallion for the mechanical engineering department and hopes to study the biomechanics of the sport to aid with injury prevention post-graduation. Exell researched falls in the elderly that cause head and neck injuries and created a method that calculates the impact velocity from videos that had been previously recorded of falls in an elder care facility and translated that information into determining the chance of injury.

You can catch Exell on the course this fall for the Wolverines as he looks to improve upon an already impressive career at UM-Dearborn.