Joseph F. Clark, Ph.D.

As a person who has been trying to “help” people for an entire career. Being on the cusp of producing a drug that will drastically improve the lives of numerous patients is humbling and daunting.

Please pardon my question to you about this as I’m sure you get many off the cuff type of neurology questions ……. but my father is dying so I was curious…

I wanted to express an opinion to my EMS colleagues. This is not a policy statement or educational mandate, but simply one person’s opinion and an invitation to think about some types of brain pathology seen in the pre-hospital setting. Please recall that my career is concerning the diagnosis, treatment and work towards improving the [...]

Short Sighted Stroke Studies. Excuse the alliteration in the title but it sums up my sentiments. I recently attended the American Heart Associations’ International Conference on Stroke and am sadly disappointed. The reason is because it seems that everything is geared to very short term immediate returns and little investment in the future. Please note, [...]

Every family in the USA is one stroke short of bankruptcy.

A student came to my office to enquire about becoming a graduate student in my lab. She was extremely bright, energetic and had done some homework about my work as evidenced by the insightful questions she was asking. I put a lot of weight on the questions and dialogue that occurs when I interview, and [...]

There are few acute medical conditions that can quickly cause a young healthy adult to die. A non exhaustive list of these are: ruptured appendix, pulmonary embolism, deep venous thrombolism, ectopic pregnancy, heat stroke, stroke, heart attack (sudden cardiac arrest), and meningitis. With this blog being about neurologic emergencies I posit as significant that 3 [...]

Patients who donate their bodies to science and/or agree to participate in clinical trials are my heroes. I say that with the conviction of a scientist who has directly benefited from their benevolence. To do the research that I do on stroke I have collected hundreds of litres of human Cerebral Spinal Fluid (CSF) from [...]

I do stroke research and research associated with neurologic emergencies. During a stroke and after some kinds of head injuries one million brain cells can die per minute. As minutes tick by more and more of the brain is irreversibly lost. Ambulance personnel know when this is happening based on their training, but medical technology [...]

I’ve been privileged to have multiple rewarding jobs in my life and working on the ambulance is the ride of a lifetime. I cannot emphasize enough how that experience has helped me in my career. I have recently been able to advocate for research into pre-hospital technologies. My main research enterprise is now able to [...]