Laura A. Malone, MD, PhD

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.

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.