The Federal Government’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is proposing new rules for how they review, prioritize, and disburse federal grants. There is strong consensus across the scientific and advocacy communities that this proposed rule will have a significant negative impact on SCI research going forward. It is imperative that you and everyone you know in the spinal cord injury community push back against these proposals by writing a public comment on the...

On June 15th I had the honor of delivering a keynote address to several hundred researchers at the 43rd Annual National Neurotrauma Society Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. To prepare my presentation, I asked myself: “If you had a giant billboard you could put up on the research interstate highway, what message would you want everyone to see?” After much deliberation to land on a singular, critical topic, I decided to be blunt, honest and just say everything...

Many of our discussions about SCI recovery deal with developing research strategies or interventions that are on the horizon. Today, we are discussing an intervention that can restore function right now: nerve transfer. Nerve transfers can be thought of as animating dead wires by redirecting current from live wires. To explain what's actually happening, we’ve brought on Dr. Justin Brown, who has pioneered the field and our friend, Macy Lauren Ledet, a recipient of nerve transfer surgery. Justin has performed hundreds of nerve transfer surgeries and is pushing the research to...