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TC's Andrew Gordon is Honored by the National Academy of Kinesiology
Andrew Gordon, Professor of Movement Sciences and Director of TC's Center for Cerebral Palsy Research, has been elected an Active Fellow in the National Academy of Kinesiology (NAK).
Andrew Gordon, Professor of Movement Sciences and Director of TC’s Center for Cerebral Palsy Research, has been elected an Active Fellow in the National Academy of Kinesiology (NAK). The NAK has a maximum of 150 Active Fellows.
“This recognition is a testament to Andy's many years of productive scholarship and his influence on the field,” said Stephen Silverman, Professor of Education, Chair of TC’s Department of Biobehavioral Sciences and himself a NAK Fellow.
Gordon has championed an approach called Hand-Arm Bimanual Intensive Therapy (HABIT) which requires children with hemiplegia – a severe weakness in the limbs resulting in very low dexterity on the affected side of the body – to make equal use of their weak-side limbs. Working with Kathleen Friel, a neurobiologist at Columbia medical School, he has documented gains in children’s mobility following just three and a half weeks of daily bimanual therapy. Gordon and Friel are also seeking evidence of “brain plasticity,” or the development of new neural pathways in response to rehabilitation.
Together with Marco Santello, a professor of biomedical engineering at Arizona State University, Gordon recently received a $640,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to expand studies of the intricate sensory and cognitive connections between the brain and the hands. New discoveries about such connections could benefit people with neurological disorders such as cerebral palsy and Parkinson’s disease and cerebral palsy, as well as those who need prosthetic hands.
Published Thursday, May. 10, 2012
