Nationwide Children's Hospital
Columbus, United States
Dear WMS members,
I would be honored to represent you on the WMS executive board. The upcoming meeting in Halifax will be my 11th congress. As the premier organization invested in advancing research and patient care for neuromuscular disorder, membership in the WMS played a defining role in my early career by allowing me to meet and collaborate with international researchers and clinical experts. In addition to maintaining the long-standing collaborative venue for scientific discussion among leaders in the field, I would like to help expand the reach of the society to have a greater impact on community clinicians working in neuromuscular disorders as well as in patients’ lives. By magnifying the society’s presence, a clinician could easily find state of the art resources on our website. By maintaining an up-to-date repository of resources, the society has the potential improve patient care on an individual level as well as become a cutting-edge source of information.
My commitment to clinical care, research and service resulted in being elected to the international TREAT NMD executive board and serving on the conference program committee. I also chaired the European Neuromuscular Congress on COVID considerations for outcome measure data and will be chairing this year’s North American Masterclass for Limb girdle muscular dystrophy.
If elected, I will be the first physical therapist clinical researcher on the executive committee. My background will allow me to bring new insights to the board and serve as a direct liaison to other ancillary healthcare professionals. In addition to being a principal investigator in the Center for Gene Therapy I also serve as a “gold standard clinical evaluator”. In this role I have trained clinical evaluators on 5 continents in preparation for trials in Duchenne muscular dystrophy, limb girdle muscular dystrophy, spinal muscular atrophy and Pompe. Through these interactions I can serve as an ambassador for the WMS and encourage interest and participation in our organization.
As a research scientist and physical therapist, Dr. Lowes professional mission is to conduct translational research to advance the development of therapeutics for rare diseases. She designs and facilitate definitive clinical trial results by providing longitudinal natural history data on rare neuromuscular disorders (NMD). This generates data-driven decisions on study design and evidence-based care guidelines to improve a patients’ wellbeing.
Linda originally received her physical therapy degree from The Ohio State University. After working as a clinician for five years she returned to Drexel University to obtain her doctoral degree in pediatric physical therapy. Linda is currently a principal investigator and leads the Lowes neuromuscular outcome measures research lab in the Center for Gene Therapy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. She also serves as an Associate Professor in The Ohio State University College of Medicine. As part of the center for gene therapy she has helped plan and implement eight first in human gene therapy clinical trials.
To maximize the likelihood of a conclusive clinical trial she leads natural history studies to quantify the natural disease progression. This information can be used in clinical trial planning to determine sample size and study duration requirements. It also allows her to evaluate the responsiveness of traditional outcome measures. Based on the performance of an outcome measure in a natural history trial, if needed, Linda modifies the measure or a develops a novel measure. She has developed or contributed to the development of 5 new functional assessments.
A list of my published work can be found here: L Lowes bibliography
