The Evolving Focus of Spinal Cord Injury Research. From Neuroregeneration to Neuroplasticity Across 30 Years
The 2025 Distinguished G. Heiner Sell Lectureship of ASIA will be presented by Dr. James David Guest, MD, PhD, FAANS, FASIA, Professor of Neurological Surgery, Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at the Miller School of Medicine in Miami, FL.
Dr. James Guest was born in Canada and attended the University of Alberta for his medical degree. Internship and residency in Neurosurgery were undertaken at the University of British Columbia. After his spinal cord injury rotation at the Shaughnessy Hospital unit, he undertook a Neuroscience Ph.D in spinal cord regeneration at the University of Miami. He was mentored by Richard and Mary Bunge with rotations in the laboratory of Martin Schwab in Zurich and Lars Olsen in Stockholm. He then returned to Vancouver to complete a residency, briefly participating in the nascent ICORD before moving to the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix for a spinal fellowship and postdoctoral training. He joined the Neurosurgical Faculty and the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis in 1999, serving eleven years at the Miami Veteran’s Hospital with a focus on clinical complications of spinal cord injury. Since 2012, he has worked full-time on spinal cord injury clinical trials and preclinical studies of neuroprotection, cell transplantation, biologics for neuroplasticity, and neuromodulation. He joined the North American Clinical trials network as a site PI in 2006 and assumed leadership of the Network in 2019.
Dr. Guest serves as Chair of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation Scientific Committee and with the International Spinal Research Trust UK and California Institute of Regenerative Medicine. He has been an ASIA board member and served on the International Standards and Research Committee.
The G. Heiner Sell Lectureship was inaugurated in 1982, following the untimely death of Dr. Sell the previous year. At that time, Dr. Sell was the President-Elect of ASIA. The association wanted to memorialize him by presenting this named lecture as the keynote of its annual conference.
The 2025 Sell Lecture “The Evolving Focus of Spinal Cord Injury Research. From Neuroregeneration to Neuroplasticity Across 30 Years” will be presented by Dr. Guest on the first day of the Annual Scientific Meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, June 2-4. Complete conference information can be found online here.
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