OUR MISSION

About NorthStar

This website is intended to help families and individuals navigate the difficult terrain after spinal cord injury (SCI). The first few years after SCI can be challenging for both the person with SCI and their support person. There may be many transitions in medical and rehabilitative care that involve navigating different kinds of institutions and resources.

As a support person, you play a central role by taking on the tasks of finding resources to help your loved one recover and get back to their roles in the community. While your loved one is focusing on physical rehabilitation and emotional recovery, you may be left wondering how you can help.

You may be spending long hours on the phone or searching the internet (or both!) to find information about recovery and care. At times, you may be overwhelmed with information, yet still seek answers to questions that you don’t even know you have.

This website is designed to navigate you through the questions to ask during the stages of recovery after SCI as well as to the resources that will answer those questions.

How to Use

This website explains SCI injury in an easy and friendly way. Living with SCI means you need to know a lot of things and no one can know it all! Our website points you to the right resources when you need them. We want to make living with SCI easier.

Background

I saw two main problems. First, the patients were leaving inpatient rehabilitation faster than before. Second, because of this, the patients and their families felt rushed to prepare for life after surgery. I’ll never forget when a gentleman with a new high-cervical level spinal cord injury was worried about his care timeline. He lost his job and income and was pressured with insurance and resources. He was nervous about rehabilitation and building a successful life after SCI. It was more than losing mobility and other functions

Meet the Team

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Anne Bryden

Dr. Anne Bryden is Associate Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and MetroHealth Center for Rehabilitation Research. She is also Director of Clinical Trials and Research for the Institute for Functional Restoration of CWRU and part-time lecturer in the Occupational Therapy Doctorate Program at Cleveland State University. Dr. Bryden received her Bachelor of Science in Occupational Therapy from Cleveland State University, and PhD in Sociology from CWRU. Anne has worked for over 30 years helping upper limb management of people with tetraplegia. She is interested in upper extremity assessment, surgical interventions, outcomes measurement, and how social factors impact health and wellness of people with long-term physical disability.

Now, she focuses on using human rights ideas to understand problems with disabilities and their support person with receiving services and technology to improve their lives.

Dr. Brian Gran

Dr. Brian Gran is a sociologist and lawyer and is part of the faculty of the Sociology Department, Law School, and Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences of Case Western Reserve University. He earned his JD from Indiana University and PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy at Yale University. As a Fulbright Scholar, he visited the Law School of Reykjavik University and

conducted research on Iceland’s Children’s Rights Ombudsperson. He published journal articles, opinion editorials, and four books. He served as a member of the Council of the Science and Human Rights Coalition of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the U.S. National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists, a group advising on national policy around law, technology, and science. He also advised the United Nations on the human right to science. Gran is the first sociologist awarded the Jefferson Science Fellowship of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Dr. Susan W. Hinze

Dr. Susan W. Hinze is a sociologist at Case Western Reserve University. She earned her PhD from Vanderbilt University. She researches and teaches medical sociology, health inequalities, gender, and the emerging work/family or work/life relations. Her brother’s accident sparked her interest in research on SCI. Thanks to a PhD student in her medical sociology class (See Dr. Anne Bryden), she joined a research team to study recovery, reintegration into the community, and interventions to restore function during Year One after an injury (See Dr. Kim Anderson). Now, she works with Anderson, Bryden, and Gran to study the needs of support person helping the patient during the Year One of their injury. She uses intersectional lens (racism, ableism, and classism) to understand difficulties of those who got SCI by a firearm.

Dr. Kim Anderson

Dr. Anderson-Erisman is a Professor in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the MetroHealth Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Medicine. She works on studies that focus on quick effective delivery of the discovery to the patients. She works to bring basic science, clinical science, and the public community living with spinal cord injury (SCI) closer. She focuses on listening to the people living with SCI’s experience with clinical research. For this work she was awarded the Craig H. Neilsen Visionary Prize in 2021 and elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2023. She also works to increase partnerships between researchers and people living with SCI during research duration. She is currently the Director of the Northeast Ohio Regional Spinal Cord Injury Model System of Care. She was also a co-founder and the inaugural President of the North American Spinal Cord Injury Consortium.

Daniel Lopez

Daniel Lopez holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Ohio Northern University and a Master of Education in School Counseling from Cleveland State University. After experiencing a spinal cord injury in 2018, he moved to a career in Salesforce. He used his problem-solving mindset to solve challenges and develop solutions. He also helps in spinal cord injury research using his experience.