Governor honors stroke rehabilitation researcher with Award for Excellence

On an early spring Sunday in March, friends, family, stroke survivors and researchers gathered at Mount Pleasant’s waterfront park for the MUSC’s Stroke Recovery Research Center’s annual picnic. The group could easily have been celebrating Steven Kautz, Ph.D., who established the center in 2014.  Kautz had recently learned of his selection as the winner of the 2025 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Scientific Research.

A Distinguished University Professor and chairman of the Department of Health Sciences and Research in MUSC’s College of Health Professions, Kautz was singled out for his work in stroke rehabilitation research. He will be recognized during a ceremony later this spring at the Statehouse in Columbia.

The award follows a string of accolades that Kautz has received during his 30-year career, but Kautz said this one is special because it honors the depth and breadth of his efforts.

“The award recognizes the work that I’ve been fortunate to lead over my career, especially the work that we’ve done in the last 15 years at MUSC. We’ve built MUSC into an international leader in stroke rehabilitation research in particular and neurorehabilitation research in general, and I’m very proud of the people who are a part of this,” said Kautz, who is also a senior research career scientist at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center.

Kautz didn’t set out to have a career in stroke rehabilitation research. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geophysics from Michigan State and the University of Texas respectively, but the science of the earth didn’t hold his fascination like the workings of the brain and the nervous system. He switched to biomedical engineering, got his Ph.D. and never looked back.

“I liked the science and the computational aspect of geophysics, but I wasn’t interested in the geology part,” Kautz said. “I became fascinated by the brain and the nervous system and wanted to understand how they do the amazing things that they do.”

Geophysics’ loss became stroke rehabilitation research’s gain as Kautz moved onward and upward, building a dual career in stroke recovery research and interventions both in academic medicine and at VA medical centers. He began his work with stroke patients in 1992 during his post-doctoral position at the VA Rehabilitation Research and Development Center in Palo Alto, CA.

“I was interested in how the nervous system and brain coordinated leg movements, particularly how controlling one leg influenced the action of the other leg. This is particularly fascinating when studying stroke patients, since they have asymmetry in how the two legs are controlled because one side of the body has been affected by the stroke. This perhaps makes it possible to use the intact nervous system on the unimpaired side to influence the impaired leg and improve walking.”  

As his reputation and his research funding grew, Kautz was recruited to the University of Florida and the VA Brain Rehabilitation Research Center in Gainesville. During his eight-year tenure, he broadened his research to focus more on developing innovative measurements and interventions for improving post-stroke walking.

Then, in 2010, MUSC came calling. 

Attracted by the chance to build a neurorehabilitation research program and continue his research at Charleston’s VA medical center, Kautz jumped at the chance.

He had landed in the buckle of the stroke belt and a world of opportunity.

“MUSC already had a strong clinical stroke program, and the College of Health Professions wanted to build a stroke rehabilitation research program that could collaborate with the College of Medicine’s strengths in neuroscience, neurology and psychiatry. That was very appealing to me,” Kautz said.

Momentum was on his side. Four years later, Kautz and his team were awarded a prestigious grant from the National Institutes of Health to launch the Stroke Recovery Research Center (SRRC) and train researchers to use advanced rehabilitation, neuroimaging and brain stimulation techniques for stroke rehabilitation and recovery.  

That was just the beginning.

Within a year, Kautz and his team applied for a second NIH center grant to parlay their SRRC Brain Stimulation Core into a national resource for other researchers – the National Center of Neuromodulation for Rehabilitation. 

They succeeded. The award established MUSC as one of only six sites in a network of prestigious research centers, including Brown and Stanford universities, that support rehabilitation research nationwide.

“We had fully arrived on the national scene,” Kautz said. “MUSC had become the nation’s research center in neuromodulation for rehabilitation.”  

The success solidified Kautz’s reputation not only as a top-notch researcher but also as a mentor, rainmaker for MUSC stroke recovery research and leader of an economic powerhouse. 

 

Over his career, Kautz has received more than $70 million in funding as a principal investigator, by his estimate.  The two center grants have supported nearly 60 MUSC investigators across 15 departments in their research, representing a total portfolio of $151.5 million in grant awards. In recognition of his mentoring efforts, Kautz has received the Peggy Schachte Research Mentor Award – MUSC’s highest honor for mentorship.

Kautz is proud of the awards and the funding, but he talks animatedly about those who participate in the center’s research and recovery programs and the programs’ impact on their lives.  

“Every time I talk with participants in our research studies, I am reminded just how important this center is to someone who is recovering from a stroke,” he said. “Unlike cardiology patients who typically have cardiac rehabilitation and follow-up over a lifetime, stroke patients do not typically have access to continuous follow-up rehabilitative care, even though they have similar levels of vascular risk, recurrent stroke and heart attack.” 

The statistics bear out the value of the stroke center’s programs. “Over the past 10 years, the research center has performed more than 25,000 stroke-related research sessions. Of those, more than 12,000 have been intervention-based sessions for participants who have received additional rehabilitation as part of our studies,” he said. 

Even as he reflects on his impact on so many, Kautz is looking toward the future. In 2024, he was awarded a $7.9 million federal construction grant from the National Institutes of Health to build the Clinical Research Center for Restoration of Neural-based Function in the Real World (RENEW). The center will be located on two floors in the new CHP building, scheduled to open on campus in 2026.

“This will be an amazing resource for the University and for the translational restoration of neural-based function research,” he said. “I’m so proud to be a part of this next chapter in our work.”

Reflecting on his career and his latest award, Kautz said he’s gratified that it recognizes his efforts through the decades. “My career has been marked by positive interventions and the ability to provide resources to many investigators, and I’ve been able to build something much larger than my own personal research. I’m optimistic about MUSC researchers changing what is possible for neurorehabilitation in the future with the great resources that we now have available through all the research funding.”