Zachary Graham

Dr. Zachary Graham has spent most of his early career looking into ways to preserve muscle health and function after traumatic spinal cord injury (tSCI). There are 300,000 individuals in the U..S with such injuries. The unique physiological effects of these injuries make full or even partial recovery difficult and pharmaceutical therapies have been shown to be largely ineffective. Graham has started collaborating with colleagues at IHMC to better understand how high-intensity resistance exercise improves clinical, performance, and molecular outcomes after long-duration training.

Recently, Graham has developed in interest in Parkinson’s disease. It is starting to become widely accepted that Parkinson’s may begin in the enteric nervous system where it causes disruption in digestion, gut homeostasis and even sleep, before entering the central nervous system. Outside of the traditional presenting symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (including the development of tremor and changes in gait and speech patterns), Parkinson’s is very much a mitochondrial disease.