Program in Recovery and Restoration of CNS Health and Function

We seek renewed support for our highly productive postdoctoral Training program in Recovery and Restoration of CNS Health and Function following acute injury. The launch of this program has coincided with rapid growth in the investigation of neurorecovery nationally and internationally. Locally, this training program has been at the center of a substantial expansion of clinical, translational, and research activities in neurorecovery, including the launch of an innovative clinical fellowship and recruitment of several new research faculty. Furthermore, the program has successfully recruited participants in addition to those supported directly through this mechanism, enriching the training experience for faculty and postdoctoral fellows. The overall goals of the Training program in Recovery and Restoration of CNS Health and Function remain to provide essential research training to clinician-scientists, neuroengineers, and computational neuroscientists who can then go on to produce and apply discoveries that can restore function to patients who survive disabling brain injuries. To harness both local and national opportunities for our trainees, we have redesigned the program to create a more focused environment, anchored in the rich ecosystem of Massachusetts General Hospital and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. The Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery will serve as home base for all fellows. We have recruited a distinguished biostatistician to serve on our faculty and executive committee who will oversee a rigorous curriculum in experimental design, statistics, quantitative literacy and approaches. This curriculum will be part of a formal weekly seminar program that we have constructed explicitly for our program trainees. In addition, we have designed a career development curriculum to provide trainees with essential skills in communication, grant-writing, and all other aspects of career development. The program will continue active participation by an accomplished, multidisciplinary faculty drawn from anesthesia, engineering, computational neuroscience, neurology, neurosurgery, physical medicine and rehabilitation, psychiatry, and radiology. Mentors and research experiences will cover four themes: 1) Clinical Research and Clinical Trials, 2) Computational Neuroscience, 3) From Neural Recording to Neural Imaging, 4) Neural Repair and Neuromodulation. Support is requested for 4 post-doctoral trainees per year, each of whom will be supported for 2 years. Trainees will spend a minimum of 2 years in the program. The program will combine a mentored research project within one of the theme areas with specific coursework tailored to the theme area chosen by the trainee.