Dr. Pablo Celnik is director of the Johns Hopkins Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and physiatrist-in-chief at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. He also is a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, neurology, and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. A native of Argentina, his medical degree is from the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine. He completed his residency training in neurology in Argentina and a fellowship in neurological rehabilitation at the University of Maryland. He also earned two research fellowships at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Celnik has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers.
In Part 1 if this two-part series, Dr. Celnik discusses: the number of individuals who experience a stroke in the U.S. annually and the percentage of them able to return home following treatment; kinds of impairments that result from a stroke and which ones are the most common; factors, such as age that can affect both the degree and the speed of recovery following a stroke; kinds of measures to determine neurological recovery and at what stages they are applied most effectively; periods of time in which most rehabilitation interventions take place and whether plateaus occur where further treatment is not associated with additional improvements; and a study in which he was involved to determine whether post-stroke mirror movements in the non-paretic hand are generated cortically or subcortically.