JamesKRichardsonMD

Summary

• Dr. Richardson is a tenured Professor within the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation who currently serves as the departmental director of the Electrodiagnostic Laboratory. He has pursued a balanced academic career, with elements of patient care, teaching, and research receiving similar priority, and each providing insights which serve to catalyze work in the others. He has provided lectures to medical students and resident physicians on lumbar disorders, effects of bedrest, clinical reflexes, gait/balance/fall risk, and a variety of other topics for many years. He recently initiated the Leaders and Worst seminar and the Parallel Universe series which serve to foster student wellness by providing the perspective that medical students and faculty are colleagues separated, solely, by birth order. Dr. Richardson’s research is primarily related to the refinement, interpretation, and application of electrodiagnostic measures, and the evaluation of gait, balance, and ability to successfully respond to a perturbation while walking. Through three decades of research, he has developed clinically accessible measures of lower limb sensory and motor function, as well as clinical measures of rapid (less than half a second) brain decision-making capacity, which predict a person’s ability to avoid a fall after a perturbation (e.g., tripping) while walking. When seeing patients, Dr. Richardson truly enjoys providing them and their loved ones with a clear understanding of symptoms or concerns, whether these are related to musculoskeletal or nerve disorders, or functional difficulty with gait or balance leading to increased fall risk.