Schmidt will try to determine which areas of a nerve cell should be targeted, and the level and duration of electrical stimulation that works best for nerve regeneration. Even when we provide physical guidance, it turns out the body is limited in how far it can re-grow a nerve on its own. We want to regenerate nerves as fast as possible, because if nerves are disconnected from the muscles for too long, you lose muscle function. These include hundreds of thousands of Americans injured by car wrecks, gunshot wounds or other accidents every year, as well as people with malignant tumors impacting nerves. She said the research may be very helpful to children.
Reconstructive surgery can involve moving a nerve from one part of the body to the damaged area.
But children are so small they don't have a lot of donor sites from which nerves can be taken. Schmidt, who earned her Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is an expert in the field of tissue engineering. She was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral research fellow in chemical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working for 18 months with surgeons at Harvard Medical School in nerve regeneration. She received her B.S. in chemistry at UT Austin. She was a National Science Foundation Career Award Recipient this year.