Blair Calancie, Ph.D. was born in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada). He received his PhD at Simon Fraser University (Kinesiology, mentored by Parveen Bawa).
He completed post-doctoral fellowships in Edmonton, Canada with Dick Stein and Uppsala, Sweden, with Karl-Erik Hagbarth. Dr. Calancie was a Professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of Miami/Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and he is currently a Professor of Neurosurgery at SUNY Upstate Medical University. His primary expertise is Clinical Neurophysiology, and his lab has two main areas of research interest:
1. Spinal cord injury: Dr. Calancie and colleagues have been working to develop a better understanding of how the human spinal cord changes after injury (‘plasticity’). This information has yielded the following:
a). some nerves in the human spinal cord are able to grow and make new connections to other nerves. All of this takes place below the injury and does not provide any benefit to the patient. In fact it’s probably a contributor to a major problem after SCI: autonomic dysreflexia (which the lab is currently studying in detail).

b). development of more sensitive tests to predict spontaneous, long-term recovery after injury, important for evaluating new treatments.

c). data suggest that physical training, using techniques including exercise and magnetic brain stimulation, can help improve function even years after spinal cord injury in some persons.

Dr. Calancie et al. also has an animal project currently underway to develop a surgical treatment for cauda equina injury. This type of injury accounts for up to 20% of all hospital admissions for spinal cord injury, yet it has received almost no research attention to date.

2. Intraoperative monitoring during surgery: This involves the testing of nerve and muscle function while a patient is having surgery to the brain and/or spinal cord. This testing is designed to prevent the patient from waking up worse than before surgery, by giving the surgeon early warning of anything that might be damaging nerves, before that damage becomes permanent. Testing can also be used to help distinguish between nerve and surrounding tissue, in cases where normal anatomy is lacking (e.g. around a tumor, or where there’s a large amount of scar tissue). Dr. Calancie's recent work – funded by an NIH/R01 grant – is designed to lower the incidence of improper placement of pedicle screws in the thoracic spine.

Dr. Calancie has published widely in his field and presented his research findings at numerous conferences.