Penn Bioethics Seminar | Douglas H Smith, MD

Balancing Clinical Research with National Security Concerns: Investigation of Mysterious Neurological Symptoms

Douglas H Smith, MD is the Director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair and Professor of Neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. Penn’s multidisciplined CBIR includes over twenty-five principal investigators and their laboratory staff collectively studying mechanisms, diagnosis and potential treatments of traumatic brain injury. 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. He has been an active member of the National Neurotrauma Society and currently serves as an officer. In addition, Dr. Smith is director of a multi-center NIH program grant on mild traumatic brain injury and he oversees an NIH training grant for brain injury research. His laboratory’s research interests include investigating the biomechanical effects of traumatic brain injury, imaging techniques to diagnose diffuse axonal injury, and the link between diffuse axonal injury and Alzheimer’s disease. Dr Smith’s laboratory has also engineered nervous tissue constructs that have been shown to repair spinal cord and nerve damage. These collective efforts have resulted in over 170 published reports.