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Ralph Nitkin, PhD (he/him/his)

Dep Dir, National Center for Medical Rehabilitation
NICHD/NIH
Bethesda, Maryland, United States

Ralph Nitkin, Ph.D., is the Deputy Director for the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research (NCMRR), which is located within the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) at the NIH. He received his undergraduate and Master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the area of biological sciences, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in cellular neurobiology. His postdoctoral studies at Stanford University and later work as an assistant professor at Rutgers University focused on the cellular and molecular basis of nerve-muscle synapse formation. For the past 33 years he has worked as a science administrator at the NICHD, first in the area of intellectual and developmental disabilities and for the last 23 years in the area of medical rehabilitation.

Within the NCMRR, Dr. Nitkin is particularly involved with research on the fundamental mechanisms and substrate of rehabilitation, including neuroplasticity, physiology, exercise, and other adaptive changes. He has been heavily involved in the formation of the rehabilitation research infrastructure networks (www.NCMRR.ORG), the annual rehabilitation grant-writing workshop (formerly ERRIS, currently called TIGRR), and special career-development networks for clinical neurorehabilitation, for physical/occupational therapists, and more recently for rehabilitation engineers. He has helped promote NIH research initiatives in such diverse areas as genomic factors that affect rehabilitation outcomes, promotion of exercise and diet in children with disabilities, clinical trial design in rehabilitation, technologies for healthy independent living, and research workforce diversity. He looks forward to continuing to work with rehabilitation researchers as well as those from allied fields.

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