Michelle C. LaPlaca, Ph.D. is a Professor and Associate Chair for Faculty Development in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University in Atlanta, GA, and a Research Biomedical Engineer at the Atlanta VA Medical Center.  She earned a Ph.D. in Bioengineering in injury biomechanics and completed postdoctoral training in Neurosurgery, both at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA.  She joined the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering in 1998 and founded the Translational Neurotrauma Laboratory.  She is a member of the Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and a program faculty member in the Bioengineering graduate program at Georgia Tech and the Neuroscience graduate program at Emory. She has testified before the U.S. Senate on Veterans’ Affairs on traumatic brain injury (TBI), and served as President and Program Chair of the National Neurotrauma Society.  Dr. LaPlaca is an elected Fellow in the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Neurotrauma, and is on the editorial board of Experimental Neurology.

Dr. LaPlaca’s research interests are to better understand TBI heterogeneity and the relationship between brain injury and co-morbidities such as stress, determine the role of lipid metabolism in the injury response, identify novel TBI biomarkers and the role of glymphatic system in biomarker efflux, and develop multimodal concussion assessment tools.  She helped develop the NINDS preclinical common data elements (CDEs) and is a co-Core Director of the VA interagency center PRECISE-TBI (PRE Clinical Interagency reSearch resourcE-TBI) to expand CDEs and provide end-to-end informatic tools to improve rigor, reproducibility, and transparency in research.  By working at both pre-clinical and clinical levels and using data science tools to study the complexity of TBI, this approach promotes successful clinical translation.  Dr. LaPlaca has received three patents, and has been funded from the National Institutes of Health, US Department of Veterans Affairs, National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command.Awards include a NSF CAREER award, Atlanta Business Chronicle Health Care Heroes Innovation Award, and a Brain Injury Association of America Young Investigator Award.

Research Interests:

traumatic brain injury, concussion

Publications: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/michelle.laplaca.1/bibliography/public/