APTC/CC Distinguished Lecture Series Seminar: Richard Lieber, PhD

Join in on Sept 18th, 2026, to hear from distinguished guest speaker Richard Lieber, PhD; Chief Scientific Officer & Senior Vice President of Research at the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab; Professor, Departments of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University Dr. Lieber will be presenting "Laboratory and Intraoperative Measurements of Muscle Contracture" Muscles are very adaptable and normally change based on how much we use them and how well nerves signal them. But after injuries to the brain or spinal cord - such as stroke, spinal cord injury, or cerebral palsy - these nerve signals are disrupted. This can cause muscles to become weak, stiff, and sometimes stuck in shortened positions called contractures. By studying muscle tissue from children with cerebral palsy during surgery, we discovered that their muscles are built differently at a microscopic level. The tiny units that allow muscles to contract are unusually stretched, and the muscle cells themselves become stiffer. We also found that important repair cells inside muscle are reduced in number and don't work as well as they should. Surprisingly, we found that certain medications already used for cancer treatment may be able to "wake up" these repair cells and help muscles grow and heal again. These findings show that muscle problems after nerve injury are not caused only by the nerves - they also involve real biological changes inside the muscle. This opens the possibility t