Douglas h. smith, m.d.
Director, Penn Center for Brain Injury and Repair
Professor, Department of Neurosurgery
Dr. Smith serves as Director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair (CBIR) and is a Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania. Penn's multidisciplined CBIR includes over twenty principal investigators and their laboratory staff collectively studying mechanisms, diagnosis and potential treatments of traumatic brain injury. Dr. Smith has been an active member of the National Neurotrauma Society and currently serves as a councilor. He is also director of a multi-center NIH program on grant mild traumatic brain injury and oversees an NIH brain injury training grant. Over the last 18 years, Dr. Smith has devoted his full-time efforts to neurotrauma research following completion of fellowships in both molecular biology and neurotrauma at the University of Connecticut. His laboratory investigates the effects of mechanical stretch of axons that results in either damage or growth. They have found that rapid stretch during brain trauma can induce diffuse axonal injury. In turn, aberrant accumulation of proteins in the damaged axons can lead to pathologic changes similar to those found in Alzheimer's disease. In addition, Dr. Smith's laboratory has also recently discovered that slow continuous stretching of axon tracts in culture can stimulate enormous growth, creating transplantable nervous tissue constructs. These tissue engineered constructs have shown promise for repairing large lesions associated with spinal cord injury and peripheral nerve damage. These collective efforts have resulted in well over 100 published reports.
Dr. Smith's Neurotrauma Lab
Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Neurosurgery
Email address: smithdou@mail.med.upenn.edu