• Professor of Physical Therapy and Human Movement Sciences
• Professor of Neuroscience

PhD (1990), University of Leiden, the Netherlands

The main focus of the Oudega group is on developing clinically relevant approaches to promote recovery from sub-acute or chronic spinal cord injury. We are especially interested in investigating the repair potential of cell transplants, injectable polymers, plasticity-enhancing drugs, and neuromodulatory stimulation. We use in vivo models of spinal cord injury to explore and understand combinatorial therapies, as well as cell culture models to study fundamental aspects of the treatments we combine. In our combination of approaches, we aim to benefit additively or synergistically from the specific repair-promoting abilities of single components to ultimately maximize their combined effect on anatomical repair and functional recovery.

Our research requires multidisciplinary expertise and is often based on the principle of bi-directional translation, where a particular treatment with proven clinical efficacy is first translated into an animal model to be studied mechanistically and combined with other additive or synergistic interventions to maximize the reparative effects. The results from the pre-clinical studies are then used to guide the next clinical experiments.