Dr. Wise Young, founding director of the W. M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience and a distinguished professor, is recognized as one of the world's outstanding neuroscientists.  

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Dr. Young is committed to bringing treatments to people with spinal cord Injuries.  He built and trained a twenty-five center clinical trial network in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong where human clinical trials using umbilical cord blood mononuclear cells and lithium are underway.  In the initial results from the Phase II trial in Kunming, China, 75% of the participants (15 out of 20) recovered walking with a rolling walker.  He is establishing clinical trial networks in the United States, Norway, and India and will start Phase IIB Trials in 2016 and Phase III trials in 2017.

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Dr. Young led the team that discovered and established high-dose methylprednisolone (MP) as the first effective therapy for spinal cord injuries.  This 1990 work upended concepts that spinal cord injuries were permanent, refocused research, and opened new vistas of hope.  He also developed the first standardized rat spinal cord injury model used worldwide for testing therapies, formed the first consortium funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to test promising therapies, and helped establish several widely accepted clinical outcome measures in spinal cord injury research.