Laura A.
Malone
,
MD, PhD
707 N. Broadway.
Baltimore, MD 21205
United States
About
Dr. Laura Malone is the director of the Pediatric Post-COVID-19 Rehabilitation Clinic at Kennedy Krieger Institute. She is also a physician scientist in Kennedy Krieger's Center for Movement Studies, and is an assistant professor of Neurology and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Education
Dr. Malone completed her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University in 2011. Her doctoral research focused on the neural mechanisms underlying motor learning in healthy adults and adult patients with stroke. Following her PhD, she earned her MD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015, and completed a combined residency program in Pediatrics and Pediatric Neurology at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She joined the Kennedy Krieger Institute as a faculty member in 2020.
Dr. Malone has earned several awards including the Frank L. Coulson, Jr. Award for Clinical Excellence, and she was recognized for her dedication to medical education with induction into the Distinguished Teaching Society of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 2018.
Research
Her overarching focus is to understand complex pediatric disorders and improve outcomes using mechanistic neurorehabilitation approaches. Specifically, her work serves to better understand outcomes for children with pediatric disease and investigate mechanisms that promote good neurological recovery. The goal is to tailor neurorehabilitation therapies with a more “precision-medicine” approach. She studies how children with and without brain injury learn new movement patterns. She seeks to use this knowledge to develop new rehabilitation therapies that can maximize every child’s motor function. In line with this research, Dr. Malone has also developed a novel pediatric hemiplegic motor impairment measure to track motor function over time in children with pediatric stroke. Dr. Malone also applies this tailored neurorehabilitation approach to the novel disorder of long COVID, investigating clinical phenotypes of children with persistent symptoms after SARS-CoV-2 infection and investigating factors and mechanisms that promote good recovery.
Dr. Malone’s clinical practice focuses on the neurological care of children with perinatal stroke, other brain injuries, and long COVID.