Blog 6: The best in my career

Steve Wolf

He is a prominent physical therapist, who lives in the United States, and that is the place where he made all of his research, obtaining around twenty-eight honours and awards, and now he has been honored with the APTA National Student Conclave Living Legend Award, an annual award created in 2004 through the National Student Conclave to recognize a prominent physical therapist who has had, and continues to have, an impact the profession through teaching, research and leadership.

He has been an active member of the APTA for a lot of years and has been a past recipient of:
- Marian Williams Award for Research the Georgia Merit Award
- Robert C. Bartlett Recognition Award
- Helen J. Hislop Award for Excellence in Contributions to Professional Literature
- Lucy Blair Service Award.

And he is a past Mary McMillan Lecturer and recipient of the Neurology and Geriatric Sections awards for outstanding publications too.

Recently, he served on the Steering Committee to help organize the very successful "Physical Therapy and Society Summit" (PASS), the PASS was the first event for APTA(American Physical Therapy Associated) and the Physical Therapy profession.The mission of that event determine areas of opportunity to empower physical therapists to be leaders in:

1) integrating en new technologies and practice models
2) establishing collaborative multidisciplinary partnerships that address current, evolving, and future societal health care needs.

His Works

Initially, he focused on the role of feedback to enhance movement control from which emerged interests in muscle monitoring and retraining of stroke patients with EMG biofeedback, the use of Tai Chi to improve postural control in elderly individuals to reduce or prevent falling, and the effect of constraint-induced movement therapy of the hemiplegic upper extremity on recovery of movement function.

He is involved in research to co-register "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)" mapping of the motor cortex. He has received NIH funding ( a monetary funding) to pursue all these interests and most recently has received federal support to study the effects of robotic assistance on improvement of upper extremity function among patients with stroke.