Dr. Selzer is an internationally recognized expert in the mechanisms of recovery and repair following injury to the nervous system. Dr. Selzer is frequently consulted by patients with seizure disorders, trigeminal neuralgia and by those who have sustained an injury to the nervous system, such as spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury or stroke. He is a member of the American Society of Neurorehabilitation, in which he has served on the Board of Directors, the American Neurological Association, the Society for Neuroscience, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, in which he has served as Chair of the Section on Neural Repair and Rehabilitation.

Dr. Selzer obtained his M.D. and a Ph.D. in Physiology from New York University School of Medicine, where he also interned in Medicine. After two years as an officer in the Public Health Service and research fellow at the National Institute of Neurologic Diseases and Stroke, he trained in Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, where he has remained on the faculty of Neurology. Since 1991, he has held a joint appointment in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine and serves as its Research Director. Dr. Selzer’s research is in the area of regeneration in the central nervous system, using the spinal cord of the sea lamprey as a model for determining the molecular mechanisms that underlie regrowth of nerve fibers after injury.

He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other government and voluntary organizations and has served on peer review panels for the NIH and the Division of Veterans Affairs. Dr. Selzer is the author of over 80 research articles, chapters and reviews in the areas of neural regeneration, spinal cord injury, epilepsy and sensory physiology. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair, the official journal of the American Society of Neurorehabilitation, the World Federation of Neurorehabilitation and the national societies of neurorehabilitation of twenty other countries.

In recent years, Dr. Selzer served as Associate Dean for Graduate Education/Director of Biomedical Graduate Studies (BGS) at the University of Pennsylvania. As Director of BGS, he oversaw the Ph.D. degree programs in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. These programs involve 500 faculty and 550 graduate students, of which approximately 150 are in the combined M.D.-Ph.D. program. He also served as director of the Clinical Neuroscience Track, a unique, NIH-funded program that provides curricular enrichment and research opportunities for more than 100 medical students interested in the clinical neurosciences, including Neurology, Neurosurgery, Psychiatry and related specialties.

More recently, he has published a two-volume Textbook of Neural Repair and Rehabilitation (Cambridge University Press) that has been received as a field-defining text by the neurorehabilitation community. He has also been chosen President-Elect of the World Federation for NeuroRehabilitation. As of May 2007, he is serving as Director, Rehabilitation Research and Development, US Department of Veterans Affairs.

 

 

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