Collaborations

The Cornwall / Goh lab engages in research collaborations with other investigators based at Cincinnati Children's, as well as researchers from other institutions. Our current collaborations include:

Plexus Nexus

Dr. Cornwall founded and leads Plexus Nexus, an international working group of surgeons, therapists, scientists, engineers, and other experts in brachial plexus injuries. The goal of this group is to identify the top priorities for improvement in care of brachial plexus injuries and to assemble collaborative teams to address them.

Neuromuscular Development Group

The Neuromuscular Development Group (NDG) was founded in 2014 to foster collaboration among scientists studying various aspects of neuromuscular development and disease. The NDG includes the laboratories of Roger Cornwall / Qingnian Goh, Doug Millay, Steve Crone, Mike Jankowski and Mattia Quattrocelli. Collaborative efforts include research regarding neurological control of muscle growth, neural circuit development, respiratory muscle recruitment in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and muscle afferent innervation, among other topics.

Nikolaou S, Cramer AA, Hu L, Goh Q, Millay DP, Cornwall R. Proteasome inhibition preserves longitudinal growth of denervated muscle and prevents neonatal neuromuscular contractures. JCI Insight. 2019 Dec 5;4(23).

Jason Long, PhD

We collaborate with Jason Long, PhD in the Cincinnati Children’s Motion Analysis Laboratory on several projects, including a study investigating similarities in muscle contracture phenotype between neonatal brachial plexus injury and cerebral palsy.

Scott Delp, PhD & Gabriel Sanchez, PhD

We are currently collaborate with Scott Delp, PhD at Stanford University and Gabriel Sanchez, PhD at Zebra Medical Technologies to investigate similarities in muscle contracture phenotype between neonatal brachial plexus injury and cerebral palsy, using a novel needle microendoscope to nondestructively measure muscle sarcomere lengths in human muscles. This ongoing research is funded in part by the Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America.

Kate Saul, PhD

In collaboration with Kate Saul’s Biomechanics Lab at North Carolina State University, we investigated the relative contributions of impaired muscle growth and muscle activity imbalance on shoulder deformity following neonatal denervation. This investigation used computational modeling to translate our findings from the animal model to the human shoulder, and resulted in a 2015 publication:

Cheng W, Cornwall R, Crouch DL, Li Z, Saul KR. Contributions of muscle imbalance and impaired growth to postural and osseous shoulder deformity following brachial plexus birth palsy: A computational simulation analysis. J Hand Surg Am. 2015 Apr 3.

Rick Lieber, PhD

We collaborated with Rick Lieber while he was leading the National Skeletal Muscle Research Center at the University of California San Diego, investigating the biomechanics of denervated, fibrotic muscle. This collaboration was supported by an NIH R24 Subaward and contributed to a 2014 publication:

Nikolaou S, Hu L, Tuttle LJ, Weekley H, Christopher W, Lieber RL, Cornwall R. Contribution of denervated muscle to contractures after neonatal brachial plexus injury: not just muscle fibrosis. Muscle Nerve. 2014 Mar;49(3):398-404.