Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Spinal cord injury is a devastating disease that affects individuals physically, emotionally, and economically. Currently, there is no cure for spinal cord injury. However, promising research in our laboratory has demonstrated the ability to restore voluntary motor control after severe spinal cord injury via spared nervous system circuits with a strategy termed neuroprosthetic rehabilitation: a combination of immediate motor control with electrochemical spinal cord stimulation and subsequent neuroplasticity developed with long-term training regimens. Despite these positive results, how this strategy enables control centers above the injury to use formed connections with spinal circuits below the level of injury to mediate locomotion remains unknown. The aim of this project is to elucidate the circuit-level mechanisms that mediate this process by anatomically understanding the residual connections below the level of injury then determining the functional contribution of these pathways to motor control after injury both in the short-term and in the long-term after neuroplasticity has occurred. This understanding will help with the future design of interventions that target the identified neural circuits as well as provide a stronger basis on which these interventions, including neuroprosthetic rehabilitation, can be translated into human trials to help individuals with spinal cord injury.