Joseph W Sanger, PhD

Dr. Dennis Stelzner has been elected a Fellow in the American Association of Anatomists. He was presented with a citation and plaque at the annual meeting of the American Association of Anatomists during the FASEB meeting on April 12, 2011 in Washington, DC.

The citation reads:
Spinal cord injury (SCI) has been studied during his entire career using neuroanatomical and ultrastructural methods. He showed that the ability of nerve tracts to regenerate or grow around partial SCI during development is dependent on their maturation at the time of injury.

Differences were also found in the ability of frog optic and tectal efferent axons to regenerate through the same diencephalic injury. The intrinsic cellular response needed for CNS axons to regenerate is the focus of his present work on propriospinal neurons using "molecular neuroanatomy" to determine factors underlying a maximal regenerative response after spinal cord injury.