Welcome From the Chair

In September, we settled into the new Mount Sinai Rehabilitation Center at Mount Sinai Morningside, located in Upper Manhattan. This new space offers state-of-the-art technology, all designed with the patient’s care and comfort in mind. These include consoles that are adaptive to the patient’s injury—spinal cord injury, for example—and rooms are fitted with smart screens that help patients make requests, see their care schedule, or even project photos of loved ones. All beds are equipped with lifts to transfer patients, easing the process for patients and health care providers alike. Even the room design and color schemes are evidence-based to help with the healing process.

Our researchers have been pushing boundaries in understanding brain injury. Kristen Dams-O’Connor, PhD, Director of the Brain Injury Research Center, co-led an international initiative for developing a new framework for categorizing severity of traumatic brain injury—refreshing a diagnostic tool that has been left untouched for more than 50 years. Raj Kumar, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Rehabilitation and Human Performance, published a paper on leveraging artificial intelligence to develop clinical phenotypes of brain injury, which doubtlessly will help clinicians provide more personalized treatments. These achievements are included in this year’s Specialty Report, and we invite you to read about them in detail.

We continue to excel nationally in medical education, with one of the largest PM&R education sections in the country—a total of 48 trainees. Our residency has been ranked in the top 10 nationally by Doximity for more than five years running. We have had three residents in the past seven years be chair of the residency and fellow council at the Association of Academic Physiatrists, and we couldn’t be more proud of them.

I look forward to the growth that the Department of Rehabilitation and Human Performance will experience in this coming year, and we will continue to do so in concert with our faculty, staff, learners, and researchers.