Meet Our Lab Director
Dr. Hui Zhong
Invaluable to all of the Edgerton research works over the last 30 years, she is the primary or co-author of 115 peer-reviewed manuscripts. Since 2020 she has been studying the effects of neuromodulation and activity-based training to improve motor function in patients with cerebral palsy.
Dr. Zhong joined Dr. Edgerton’s Neuromuscular Plasticity Laboratory in 1994. The Edgerton lab and its collaborators are the premier labs in the world of neuromodulation and spinal cord injury research. His team was the first to show that a combination of epidural stimulation and subject specific rehabilitation strategies could recover to significant levels of not only sensory-motor function but also control of autonomic systems, such as bladder, bowl and sexual function. Subsequently, his lab has played a leading role in the development of noninvasive spinal transcutaneous stimulation to increase the accessibility of neuromodulation, and has discovered similar outcomes with stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and most dramatically in Cerebral Palsy (CP) children. Recently, the lab has published three papers related to neuromodulation and CP, with one being featured in Nature Communications. These papers study the basic hypothesis for the mechanism of the effects of non-invasive spinal neuromodulation, the acute effects of a single treatment, and chronic effects that evolve with repetitive treatments (2/week) over a period of 8 weeks.
All the achievements above were based on decades of dedicated research works of the team with animal studies. The lab was first to show that with activity dependent training the spinal cord of cats with a complete spinal transection could learn and forget how to stand and step. This finding demonstrated that the neuronal network in the spinal cord could be modulated to perform motor task without brain. Subsequently, the lab began focusing on developing different neuromodulation strategies including spinal cord stimulation, stem cell transplantation and pharmacological modulation combined with locomotor training. The animal research results were successfully transferred to spinal cord injured human subjects beginning 13 years ago.