Course Descriptions

In the United States, more than 5.5 million people suffer from different forms of traumatic brain injury (TBI) or spinal cord injury (SCI). The combined health care costs for TBI and SCI in the US alone amount to over $70 billion annually. TBI is the leading cause of death and disability in children and young adults in the United States. Thus, these mechanical injuries provide a significant health care, economic, and personal challenge for the people affected by them. Although significant progress has been made in recent decades in understanding the underlying mechanisms and developing new treatments, we are still far away from reliable methods that would allow full repair of injured nerves. This is largely due the fact that the adult mammalian central nervous system has a very limited regeneration capacity. This seminar course is targeted at graduate students in the life sciences, biomedical engineering, and health sciences with an interest in basic and translational neuroscience. We will discuss key papers on the underlying mechanisms, treatments, and diagnostics of SCI and TBI. Besides classical papers we will also focus on the most recent developments in this field.