Jennifer A. Semrau

About

Jennifer A. Semrau is a leading researcher in sensorimotor neuroscience and neurorehabilitation, with a particular focus on proprioception, kinesthesia, and motor recovery following stroke and perinatal brain injury. Her work has fundamentally advanced the objective measurement of somatosensory deficits — a historically underappreciated dimension of stroke recovery — through the innovative application of robotic technology. Semrau's pioneering studies demonstrated that robots could reliably detect and quantify kinesthetic and proprioceptive impairments that standard clinical assessments routinely miss, transforming how researchers and clinicians assess sensory function after neurological injury. Her research has illuminated the neural architecture underlying proprioception, identifying distributed cortical networks and lesion sites associated with persistent sensory deficits after stroke. Importantly, she has extended this work to children with hemiparetic cerebral palsy secondary to perinatal stroke, revealing bilateral reaching and sensory deficits that challenge traditional assumptions about the "unaffected" limb. Collectively, her ten most-cited papers have accumulated over 850 citations, reflecting the broad influence of her contributions across adult and pediatric rehabilitation science. Semrau's work continues to shape patient-centered approaches to stroke recovery by establishing rigorous, quantitative tools that capture the full scope of neurological impairment.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Robotic Identification of Kinesthetic Deficits After Stroke

   172 citations · 2013
2. 2
   Examining Differences in Patterns of Sensory and Motor Recovery After Stroke With Robotics

   121 citations · 2015
3. 3
   Lesion locations associated with persistent proprioceptive impairment in the upper limbs after stroke

   82 citations · 2018
4. 4
   Central perception of position sense involves a distributed neural network – Evidence from lesion-behavior analyses

   75 citations · 2016
5. 5
   Robotic Characterization of Ipsilesional Motor Function in Subacute Stroke

   75 citations · 2017
6. 6
   Bilateral reaching deficits after unilateral perinatal ischemic stroke: a population-based case-control study

   73 citations · 2018
7. 7
   Localization of Impaired Kinesthetic Processing Post-stroke

   68 citations · 2016
8. 8
   Kinesthetic deficits after perinatal stroke: robotic measurement in hemiparetic children

   67 citations · 2017
9. 9
   Robotic Quantification of Position Sense in Children With Perinatal Stroke

   66 citations · 2016
10. 10
    A composite robotic-based measure of upper limb proprioception

    59 citations · 2017

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links