George F. Wittenberg, MD, PhD

  • Visiting Professor, Neurology

Phone

412-648-4178

E-mail

GEOWITT@pitt.edu

Campus Address

3520 Fifth Ave, #201

One-Line Research Description

Restoration of voluntary movement after neurological injury.

Dr. Wittenberg’s overall goal is the restoration of voluntary movement after neurological injury and in neurological disorders. His ongoing research interests presently lie in using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and functional imaging to understand motor cortical reorganization following stroke and in designing and testing new methods for neurorehabilitation. He has been conducting clinical trials with robotic rehabilitation and continues to study the neural plasticity that underlies it. He is developing hybrid methods of combining TMS with robotic and virtual reality training, and multimodal physiological monitoring with feedback control of robotic assistance, to maximize the return of motor function after neurological injury by harnessing activity-dependent brain plasticity. Other interests in include bimanual rehabilitation and exploration of knowledge representation in the area of brain connectivity in order to understand and model human motor function. 

Representative Publications

- Jones-Lush L, Judkins T, Wittenberg G. Arm movement maps evoked by cortical magnetic stimulation in a robotic environment. Neuroscience. 2010; 165(3):774-81.

 

- Krakauer JW, Carmichael ST, Corbett D, Wittenberg GF. Getting neurorehabilitation right: what can be learned from animal models? Neurorehabil Neural Repair. 2012 Oct; 26(8):923-31.

 

- Kantak S, Jones-Lush L, Narayanan P, Judkins T, Wittenberg G. Rapid plasticity of motor corticospinal system with robotic reach training. Neuroscience. 2013; 247:55-64.

 

- Massie CL, Kantak SS, Narayanan P, Wittenberg GF. Timing of motor cortical stimulation during planar robotic training differentially in older adults. Clin Neurophysiol. 2015; 126(5):1024-32. 

 

- Liao WW, Whitall J, Wittenberg GF, Barton JE, McCombe Waller SM. Not All Brain Regions Are Created Equal for Improving Bimanual Coordination in Individuals with Chronic Stroke. Clinical Neurophysiology, 2019; 130:1218-1230. doi: 10.1016/j.clinph.2019.04.711. PMID: 31163366.

 

- Conroy SS, Wittenberg GF, Krebs HI, Zhan M, Bever CT, Whitall J. Robot-assisted Arm Training in Chronic Stroke: Addition of Transition-to-Task Practice. Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair, 2019, accepted.