Brian K. Kwon, MD, Professor in the Department of Orthopaedics at the University of British Columbia, the Canada Research Chair in Spinal Cord Injury, and the Dvorak Chair in Spine Trauma, is the recipient of ASIA’s 2018 Apple Award. His paper titled “Spinal cord perfusion pressure predicts neurologic recovery in acute spinal cord injury” appeared in the American Academy of Neurology in October 2017.
The Apple Award for excellence in publishing in spinal cord injury rehabilitation literature is presented annually during the ASIA scientific meeting in recognition of the best published paper by a clinician or researcher in the preceding calendar year. The Apple Award is named in honor of David F. Apple, Jr., MD, founding member and Past President of the American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA). The award is a collaboration of three entities that were critically important to Dr. Apple during his long career in orthopaedic surgery at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, Georgia, where he served as founding medical director for 30 years. Dr. Apple is currently emeritus medical director of the journal “Topics in Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation” of which he was Editor-in-Chief from 1994-2011.
Dr. Kwon is an attending spine surgeon at Vancouver General Hospital, a Level 1 trauma center and regional referral center for spinal cord injuries (SCI). He is also a research scientist at the International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD) and serves as Chair of the SCI Cure Committee for the Rick Hansen Institute. His primary clinical and scientific research focus is on spine trauma and spinal cord injury (SCI). Dr. Kwon has led the development of a novel large animal model of SCI and is utilizing this for both bench-to-bedside and bedside-back-to-bench translational studies. He has also led initiatives to establish a framework for how promising therapies for SCI should be evaluated in the laboratory setting prior to translation into human patients.
