Rehabilitation and Neural Engineering Laboratory

George F. Wittenberg, MD, PhD

  • Professor
  • Medical Director

George Wittenberg, MD, PhD has a tenured appointment as professor in the Department of Neurology pending and is a Neurologist/Researcher in the Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh Healthcare System. Secondary appointments are also pending. He is Director of the Laboratory for Research on Arm Function and Therapy (RAFT), one of the Rehab Neural Engineering Labs. He arrived in Pittsburgh in 2018 as the outgoing Director of the VA Maryland Exercise and Robotics Center of Excellence. 

Dr. Wittenberg is a Fellow of the American Society of Neurorehabilitation and Board Certified in Neurology and Brain Injury Medicine. He is an Associate Editor of Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair and on the Executive Committees of the National Center of Neuromodulation for Rehabilitation and the Neurorehabilitation and Restorative Neuroscience Training Network (NRNTN, a K12 program)

Research Interest Summary

Neurorehabilitation, motor control, transcranial magnetic stimulation, functional imaging, stroke, movement disorders, neural network modeling

Research Interests

Dr. Wittenberg’s overall goal is the restoration of voluntary movement after neurological injury and in neurological disorders. His ongoing research interests presently lie in using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and functional imaging to understand motor cortical reorganization following stroke and in designing and testing new methods for neurorehabilitation. He has been conducting clinical trials with robotic rehabilitation and continues to study the neural plasticity that underlies it. He is developing hybrid methods of combining TMS with robotic and virtual reality training, and multimodal physiological monitoring with feedback control of robotic assistance, to maximize the return of motor function after neurological injury by harnessing activity-dependent brain plasticity. Other interests in include bimanual rehabilitation and exploration of knowledge representation in the area of brain connectivity in order to understand and model human motor function.