KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Dr. Perez received a Ph.D. in physical therapy from the University of Miami School of Medicine.

She attended the University of Copenhagen as a post-doctoral fellow where she studied transmission in spinal cord networks. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Human Motor Human Cortical Physiology and Stroke Neurorehabilitation Section at the National Institutes of Health, where she focused on studies of cortical physiology and plasticity.

Her main research interests are in understanding how the brain and spinal cord contribute to the control of voluntary movements in healthy humans and in individuals with spinal cord injury. She uses this mechanistic knowledge to develop rehabilitation therapies following CNS damage.

Prof Andrew I.R. Maas is Emeritus Professor of Neurosurgery at the Antwerp University Hospital and University of Antwerp.

He holds positions as past Chairman of the Neurotraumatology Committee of the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies (WFNS) and the International Neurotrauma Society, and is Co-Chairman of the European Brain Injury Consortium. He has a vast experience as a general neurosurgeon and has specific research interests in Traumatic Brain Injury and neuro-intensive care.

Dr Maas was the Principal Investigator of the IMPACT study group (International Mission on Prognosis and Clinical Trial design in TBI), that was awarded an NIH grant (2003-2011) and resulted in over 55 publications and recommendations for improved trial design. Together with Prof David Menon, University of Cambridge, he coordinated the large scale collaborative project CENTER-TBI: Collaborative European NeuroTrauma Effectiveness Research in TBI (www.center-tbi.eu), supported by the FP7 program of the European Union (Grant no: 602150; duration:2013-2021).

Assoc Prof Ceren Yarar-Fisher is an Associate Professor at the UAB Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in the UAB Heersink School of Medicine. Her translational research program focuses on understanding the pathophysiology of traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) in the acute and chronic stages with the purpose of developing novel dietary and rehabilitation strategies to improve neuro-recovery, metabolism, and microbiome composition. Thus, her laboratory is currently developing and testing therapeutic diets and electrical stimulation programs to evaluate new ways to prevent neuronal death and promote recovery and function in the acute stages and improve body composition, gut microbiome composition, and skeletal muscle and metabolic health in the chronic stages of SCI. She has received several NIH and NIDILRR funding to support her investigations in SCI.

She was selected as one of the 10 Outstanding Young Persons of Turkey by Junior Chamber International for her work in Academic leadership and/or accomplishment. She served two years as Treasurer, Chair-Elect, and Chair in American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM) SCI-Special Interest Group. She has had the privilege of mentoring a wide variety of students and trainees, including high school students, medical students, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation residents, physical therapy students, doctoral students, and post-doctoral trainees. Among her students, over 70% are racial-ethnic minorities.

DR Gary C. Sieck, Ph.D., is the Vernon F. and Earline D. Dale Professor and Distinguished Investigator of Physiology & Biomedical Engineering at Mayo Clinic and was department Chair and Dean for Research Academic Affairs.

He was President of the American Physiological Society (APS) and President of the Association of Chairs of Departments of Physiology (ACDP). He served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Physiology and Physiology, and is currently an Associate Editor of Comprehensive Physiology and FASEB BioAdvances.

He received a Ph.D. in Physiology and Biophysics from the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) in 1976 and completed postdoctoral training in Neurophysiology at UCLA in 1979, where he continued as a faculty member in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology.

In 1987, he joined the faculty in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California where he remained until 1990 when he moved to Mayo Clinic. He has trained 24 Ph.D. graduate students and 81 postdoctoral fellows. His research has been continuously funded by multiple NIH grants since 1981 and focuses on neural control of respiratory muscles. He has published 460 peer-reviewed papers with >20,00 citations and an H-index of 73.

Dr. Blesch is a Professor at the Center for Neural Repair in the Department of Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He completed his PhD in Germany prior to postdoctoral training at UCSD. After advancing through the ranks to Associate Professor, he established the Laboratory for Neuroregeneration in the SCI Center at the University of Heidelberg, Germany building a program in biomaterials, stem cells and pain after SCI.

This program was further expanded at Indiana University. He recently returned to UCSD to take advantage of the collaborative environment and translational focus at the Center for Neural Repair.

Using clinically relevant models of SCI, his research aims to identify mechanisms that influence neuronal plasticity and regeneration in the injured spinal cord, and to discover new targets and techniques for therapeutic intervention.

Current studies investigate the role of neural stem cells, biomaterials and neuronal activity to improve functional recovery, and the structural changes underlying the development of pain.

His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from NIH, ISRT, Wings for Life, Craig H. Neilsen foundation, VA, German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Ludwig-Guttmann prize of the German SCI Society.