Dr. Carter is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Stroke and Traumatic Brain Injury in the Department of Neurology and sees patients at the Comprehensive Outpatient Stroke Clinic in the Center for Advanced Medicine and at The Rehabilitation Institute of Saint Louis. Stroke is the leading cause of long-term disability in the United-States and the third leading cause of death at a cost of over $70 billion a year. For a long time it has been thought that nothing could be done to enhance a stroke patient's recovery. This nihilistic view was fed by many long held beliefs about the brain that are oversimplifications, and by a lack of tools to measure and modulate brain activity. We now know that the brain is organized as a set of interconnected, distributed networks, that it is capable of self-repair and of adaptive plasticity when repair is not possible. Dr. Carter's work is centered on understanding the mechanisms of brain plasticity at the network level to help promote better recovery after stroke. Different techniques that are being used to understand distributed brain networks include resting state functional connectivity MRI, non-invasive brain stimulation, as well as more traditional activity-based therapies. This work will also help clinicians better determine which patients are more likely to benefit from which therapies, and promote more of an evidence-based approach to neurorehabilitation. Dr. Carter is also active in promoting stroke awareness and the message of primary and secondary stroke prevention through his involvement in The Rehabilitation Institute's Patient and Family Stroke Education Series and in the wider Saint Louis community.

Medical Training

Dr. Carter received his B.A. magna cum laude from Brandeis University in 1991 with a major in neuroscience and worked as a research associate for the RWJ Pharmaceutical Research Institute. He then entered the Medical Scientist Training Program in the Harvard Medical School/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He was awarded his M.D. and Ph.D. in 2003 after completing thesis work on the role of brain-derived neurotrophic factor in synapse formation and synaptic plasticity. This was followed by a residency in neurology at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine and a T32-sponsored research fellowship in stroke rehabilitation at The Rehabilitation Institute of Saint Louis and WUSM. As a fellow, Dr. Carter worked under the guidance of Dr. Maurizio Corbetta to apply the novel technique of resting state functional connectivity MRI analysis to the study of brain networks after stroke. Dr. Carter focuses on patients recovering from stroke and stroke prevention and his work benefits from the support of an Amos Medical Faculty Development Program award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a Mentored Clinical Scientist K08 Award from the National Institute of Neurologic Diseases and Stroke, and a grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

Selected Publications

1. Carter AR, Astafiev SV, Lang CE, Connor LT, Rengachary J, Stube MJ, Pope DL, Shulman GL and Corbetta M. Resting Inter-hemispheric fMRI Connectivity Predicts Performance after Stroke (Submitted to Annals of Neurology, 2009).

2. Carter AR, Shulman GL and Corbetta M. Chapter: Brain Mapping of Attention and Neglect after Stroke. Brain Repair After Stroke (upcoming), Cramer S. and Nudo R. editors.

3. Carter AR, Berry E, Schwartz PM, Segal RA. Regional expression of p75NTR contributes to neurotrophin regulation of cerebellar patterning. Mol Cell Neurosci. 2003 Jan;22(1):1-13.

4. Carter AR, Chen C, Schwartz PM, Segal RA. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor modulates cerebellar plasticity and synaptic ultrastructure. J Neurosci. 2002 Feb 15;22(4):1316-27.

5. Borghesani PR, Peyrin JM, Klein R, Rubin J, Carter AR, Schwartz PM, Luster A, Corfas G, Segal RA. BDNF stimulates migration of cerebellar granule cells. Development. 2002 Mar;129(6):1435-42.

6. Dubinsky B, Vaidya AH, Rosenthal DI, Hochman C, Crooke JJ, DeLuca S, DeVine A, Cheo-Isaacs CT, Carter AR, Jordan AD, Reitz AB, Shank RP. 5-ethoxymethyl-7-fluoro-3-oxo-1,2,3,5-tetrahydrobenzo[4,5]imidazo[1,2a]pyridine-4-N-(2-fluorophenyl)carboxamide (RWJ-51204), a new nonbenzodiazepine anxiolytic.
J Pharmacol Exp Ther. 2002 Nov;303(2):777-90.

7. Carter AR, Segal RA. Rett syndrome model suggests MECP2 gives neurons the quiet they need to think. Nat Neurosci. 2001 Apr;4(4):342-3.

8. Herman AE, Galaburda AM, Fitch RH, Carter AR, Rosen GD. Cerebral microgyria, thalamic cell size and auditory temporal processing in male and female rats. Cereb Cortex. 1997 Jul-Aug;7(5):453-64.