His best friend’s devastating injury spurred Tim O’Shea to become an expert in spinal cord tissue regeneration and recovery
Although Assistant Professor Tim O’Shea (BME, MSE) was always interested in STEM, it wasn’t until his junior year of high school that his interest evolved into a personal mission.
Growing up in Brisbane, Australia, he saw there was a surplus of mining and mechanical engineering opportunities in the state, lending itself to a vibrant engineering community. However, when his best friend suffered a spinal cord injury playing rugby, O’Shea knew he wanted to study the Central Nervous System (CNS) to improve methods of rehabilitation and repair.
“He was an in-patient for almost a year,” O’Shea recalls. He would work with his friend in the process of rehabilitation, and was confronted at a young age with the harsh reality of living with a spinal cord injury. “[Later,] I had this serendipitous interaction with a professor at the university I ended up going to for undergraduate, who told me about medical engineering and the idea of developing exoskeletons and various prosthetic-type devices to help people walk again.” From there the mission was simple: O’Shea would go to university and pursue a degree in medical engineering, seeking to help people like his best friend following various neurotrauma.
During his time as an undergraduate, O’Shea was introduced to the widespread capability of cellular-molecular manipulations in biomedical engineering. Where he once sought to help with the treatment of spinal cord injuries, he now found there were methods of research which began carving a path toward tissue regeneration and ultimately recovery of spinal cord function. This led O’Shea to the U.S. for his PhD, where he’s continued his research ever since––for the last several years, at Boston University.
In the O’Shea lab, researchers advance the opportunity for spinal cord repair through biomedical engineering and research. “Not purely on spinal cord injury,” O’Shea adds, but other neurotrauma. “We work on stroke as well as neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s Disease,” primarily through their research on glial cells.
Read the full story at the BU Neurophotonics Center website.