Neurological and psychiatric disorders such as traumatic brain injury, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, autism, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and chronic pain affect well over a billion people worldwide. These disorders steal away not only life span, but also our selves and identities. More than $1,000,000,000,000 is spent yearly in the battle against these disorders, even in the absence of effective treatments for many of them. Compared with innovations in other fields, like cancer, neurotechnologies have trickled out of labs at a relatively slow pace, yielding a handful of good drugs, a couple of methods for brain stimulation, and a few ways to image and analyze brain structure and activity.

FAA Inspecting physician (and MIT graduate) Dennis Sager, M.D. of Reston shared with Herndon brain injury lawyer Doug Landau information about neuroengineering and the steps being taken to study traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”) and chronic pain, since these are conditions with which many ABRAMS LANDAU, Ltd. clients have been afflicted. Landau learned that MIT has begun experimenting with a hands-on neuroengineering curriculum, in which undergraduate and graduate students actively engage in the process of becoming neuroengineers, learning to solve intractable problems of the brain by actually doing it. Landau visited MIT last year while in Cambridge meeting with a brain injury and vocational experts during the International Neurology Conference.