Center News        BRAVO- News about Investigator Accomplishments

This website is for persons affected directly or indirectly by impairments caused by a neurologic injury or disease and for those providing treatments and those working to improve treatments for the many different impairments that neurologic injuries and diseases can cause. 

Use this website to learn more about neurologic injuries and diseases such as stroke, a leading cause of serious, long-term disability. Treatments today are often not able to completely restore lost abilities and sometimes focus on compensating for a loss of function rather than recovering the function. The goal of the BRRC is to discover treatments that will lead to recovery of function and to test them.

Center News:  New Program Director Helms the BRRC

Dr. Leslie Gonzalez Rothi, one of the founders of the Brain Rehabilitation Research Center (BRRC) and its Program Director for the past 12 years, recently stepped down from that position to focus all her efforts on her research.

While the vision and energy of Dr. Gonzalez Rothi as Program Director of the BRRC will be missed, we are pleased to welcome the new Program Director, Janis J. Daly, PhD, effective September 26.  Dr. Daly is a Research Career Scientist from the Louis Stokes VA Medical Center (LS VAMC) in Cleveland, OH, where she has also been Director of the Cognitive and Motor Learning Research Program and Associate Director of the Functional Electrical Stimulation Center (FESC), an RR&D Center of Excellence similar to the BRRC.  She also has been Professor of Neurology at Case Western Reserve University. 

Thanks to the foundation laid by Leslie Gonzalez Rothi; Stephen Nadeau, MD, the BRRC’s Medical Director; and their team of scientists over the past 12 years, the BRRC is recognized internationally for its advancement of neurorehabilitation.  

Dr. Daly has the experience and ability to build on that foundation to take the BRRC to the next stage of development in its mission to find treatments that will significantly improve recovery for veterans with disabilities caused by neurologic illness and injury.

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BRAVO:  Dr. Kay Waid-Ebbs Reports on the Federal Interagency TBI Conference

The Federal Interagency Conference in DC was fabulous.  TBI researchers from the NIDRR TBI model systems, DOD, and VA attended.  It was exciting to meet the faces behind the articles that have been accumulating over the years.

It was a good networking meeting and very confirming.  Much of the research presented was on the same types of research we are doing here.  A few new topics were presented, such as sleep therapy and a combination VA and TBI model systems database available to researchers.

A collaborative-building meeting between the model systems and VA was held for 4 hours in small groups to brain storm for ideas on collaborative research.  One of the most poignant realizations I had during the breakout sessions is that the current senior researchers are all close to retirement age and few junior TBI researchers were at the meeting.

BRRC INVESTIGATORS PRESENTING AND IN ATTENDANCE
  > Velozo, Wen, Waid-Ebbs, Heaton, Donovan, Singletary:  Using a Computer Adaptive Measure of Functional Cognition for Treatment Planning
  > Waid-Ebbs, Wen:  Investigation of the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF-A) Factor Structure in Individuals with TBI and the Clinical Implications
  > Fitzgerald and Uphold in attendance

Complete program agenda at: http://tbi-interagency-conference.org/index.htm