Kessler Foundation Shares Impact of Stroke Research

Steve Adubato goes on-location to the Kessler Foundation’s "Life After Stroke" event to speak with Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Glenn Reiter, and Karen Nolan, Senior Research Scientist in Human Performance and Engineering Research, to discuss the importance of stroke research and innovative research available today.

#1921 11/17/2016

Excerpt:

"We're at the Life After Stroke symposium, the conference here, that the Kessler Foundation has put together. A whole range of interesting people come together, people dealing with stroke. Funders of these efforts, research efforts. Life After Stroke is important, the foundation is dealing with, and the chairman of the board of the foundation, board of trustees, Glenn Reiter is with us. Glenn, talk to us about, first of all, your involvement in this foundation and how a private citizen like yourself got so connected and committed? Okay. Well thank you Steve. Thanks for being here. I've been a member of the board of trustees for six years, I've been the chairman for, I guess at this point, six weeks. So I'm new to the chair. But I found the Kessler mission to be very very compelling. You know, according to the federal government, 56 million Americans suffer from one or more physical or cognitive disabilities. And that's really a underserved population. In fact, it's a very low profile population. You know, 56 million Americans equates to 17 percent of our population. And the focus of the Kessler Foundation is to serve this underserved population. A conference like this tonight, what do you expect to come out of it? You know, we're... this is... this is a, what I call a "friendraiser," a community building exercise. You know, we're looking to raise the profile of the Kessler Foundation, you know, the Kessler Foundation has been doing its good works for more than a decade as a foundation. But it still is... and it has national reach, and frankly, international reach in terms of what it does. But we're still, have a little bit of a profile issue. And so an event like this, and we expect more than a hundred guests, you know, will in some small way, help to raise our profile. And people who are dealing with stroke, how important is it that we provide their testimonials, their stories, their struggles, cognitively as well as mobility issues? How important is that?
Very important. You know, people who have had a stroke often have had difficulty in terms of reclaiming their lives, in terms of regaining independence. And so the work of the Kessler Foundation in the stroke area is directed at precisely that. To allow victims of stroke to reengage in the communities, go back to their jobs, or find new jobs that work in their situation. And so it's, at the end of the day, life after stroke is about reengagement with the victims' or the patients' communities. Well said. Thank you very much Glenn. Thank you. We're talking to our good friend Dr. Karen Nolan..."