Talk:Randolph Nudo

Date of birth

Randolph Nudo was born in 1953. 169.147.5.118 (talk) 14:16, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

Request to expand Career and add Research section (COI)

Conflict-of-interest disclosure: I am Randolph J. Nudo, the subject of this article. I therefore have a conflict of interest and am not making these changes directly. I would appreciate review of the proposed changes below by an uninvolved editor.

The article currently provides relatively little information about my research and omits several established aspects of my academic career. I would like to suggest the following additions, based on published sources. I have tried to keep the proposed language neutral and concise.

Career

I suggest adding the following information to the Career section:

Nudo joined the faculty of the University of Kansas Medical Center in 1997. He subsequently served in several research and administrative roles, including director of the Landon Center on Aging and director of the Institute for Neurological Discoveries. He held the Marion Merrell Dow Distinguished Professorship in Aging and served as vice chair for research in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine. In 2017, he was named a University Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas.

I am intentionally not requesting an update to my current academic or emeritus status at this time because some KUMC webpages have not yet been updated following my 2026 retirement.

Research

I also suggest adding a Research section. The existing article identifies neuroplasticity and recovery after brain injury as my research areas but provides little information about the research itself.

Proposed text:

Research

Nudo's research has focused on the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying cortical plasticity, motor learning, and recovery of function after brain injury. Studies using intracortical microstimulation mapping in nonhuman primates demonstrated that representations of skilled movements in adult motor cortex can be modified by motor training, providing evidence for experience-dependent reorganization of adult motor cortex.

Nudo and colleagues subsequently examined cortical reorganization following focal ischemic injury. In a 1996 study published in Science, rehabilitative training of skilled hand movements after a focal motor-cortex infarct prevented loss of the hand representation in adjacent undamaged cortex and, in some animals, resulted in expansion of the hand representation into regions previously associated with movements of the elbow and shoulder. The cortical reorganization was accompanied by recovery of skilled hand function.

The study became influential in the development of experience-dependent models of post-stroke neuroplasticity and rehabilitation. Discover included the work in its Top 100 Science Stories coverage, describing the experiments and their implications for physical rehabilitation after stroke. Later reviews have highlighted the experiments as an important demonstration that rehabilitative experience can shape functional reorganization of peri-infarct motor cortex.

Later work extended these principles to neural interfaces and neuroprosthetic approaches to recovery after brain injury. In a 2013 study, Nudo and colleagues used an activity-dependent neural prosthesis that detected neural activity at one cortical site and triggered stimulation at another. In a nonhuman primate model of cortical injury, the intervention improved performance of a skilled reaching task.

The 1996 Science study has subsequently been discussed in independent reviews of stroke recovery and neurorehabilitation, including Nature Reviews Neuroscience. I have included the primary studies where necessary to describe the experiments themselves and secondary sources where the significance or subsequent interpretation of the work is discussed.

I would appreciate review and modification of the wording as appropriate under Wikipedia's policies on biographies of living persons, reliable sourcing, and conflict-of-interest editing. Thank you.

FilefishItalia (talk) 22:56, 9 August 2026 (UTC) FilefishItalia (talk) 22:56, 9 August 2026 (UTC)