Dr. Erica Dale has been awarded a $300,000, 2 year Craig H. Nielsen Foundation grant within their Spinal Cord Injury Research on the Translational Spectrum mechanism.
Erica received her B.S. in Zoology at Humboldt State University and completed a senior thesis project in human anatomical dissection and comparative anatomy. Her path has been a winding road ever since. She studied Howler Monkey time management behavior in Bocas del Toro, Panama, conducted studies on ion regulatory development in Tilapia at San Diego State University, and worked for 3 years as a nursery keeper and veterinary assistant at the San Diego Zoo. In 2011, she completed her Ph.D. in comparative biomedical sciences (minor: neuroscience) at the University of Wisconsin with Dr. Gordon Mitchell where she focused on mechanisms of spinal respiratory plasticity and, more specifically, the roles that hypoxia-inducible genes play in phrenic motor facilitation. After finishing a brief post-doctoral stint with Dr. Bill Milsom at the University of British Columbia studying ventilatory long-term facilitation in Brazilian Tegu Lizards, a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Reggie Edgerton at University of California Los Angeles, and a faculty position in Anesthesiology at UCLA, she became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience in the College of Medicine at University of Florida in 2018. Her overarching research interests involve understanding mechanisms of spinal motor learning as well as the neuromodulatory and neuroplastic mechanisms underlying therapeutic spinal cord stimulation.