Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
Help Desk: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ras/portico/helpdesk
- Professor of Clinical Neurology and Neurorehabilitation
- Clinical and Movement Neurosciences
- UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology
- Faculty of Brain Sciences




Globally, the impact of stroke-related impairment is rising. In the UK alone, the economic burden of stroke is estimated at over £9 billion a year and so improving outcomes is an important clinical and scientific goal. In particular, recovery of upper limb function is unacceptably poor and a major contributor to reduced quality-of-life. Our aim is to provide the scientific basis for understanding how to radically improve upper limb recovery after stroke in humans.
He is particularly interested in developing an empirical understanding of cerebral reorganization after stroke and how this will inform treatment strategies for patients with significant motor impairment. He investigates how patterns of brain activity during hand movement change after stroke and as part of normal ageing. Current work is concentrating on further characterisation of these differences using a combination of non-invasive brain imaging tecniques to determine whether imaging and neurophysiological measures will prove useful as biomarkers of the likelihood of responding to various forms of impairment based treatment. This is important because the power of future clinical trials to detect real improvements in function will be greatly enhanced if we are able to stratify patients according to likelihood of response based on strong mechanistic hypotheses.
In 2013, he set up the Queen Square Upper Limb Neurorehabilitation Programme, the only dedicated upper limb rehabilitation facility in the UK. This clinical service offers intensive high dose upper limb neurorehabiltaion to stroke patients and will increasingly become the focus for clinically related research into mechanisms of stroke motor recovery at UCL.
- Nick Ward completed the Programme for Professional Accreditation of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education at the Institute of Education (IoE), University of London (2004).
- He was the editor of the neurology section on Medical Masterclass - a collaboration between the Education Department of the Royal College of Physicians and Blackwell Science, an educational resource for those preparing for the MRCP examination.
- He is lead for undergraduate Stroke teaching at UCLH and is committed to improving standards with approaches learned at IoE: regular course evaluation; novel self-assessment excercises; peer observation and feedback to all lecturers; providing teaching material online.
- He co-organises UCLP Centre for Neurorehabilitation seminar series which started in 2013 - http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cnr/seminars. These seminars are attended by clinicians and researchers from throughout UCL Partners.
- He is convener of modules on the Clinical Neuroscience MSc (since 2009) and Stroke MSc (since 2015), Queen Square – delivering 2 lectures/year, selecting other lecturers, writing exam questions, marking and moderation of exam essays.
- He co-organises the Annual Queen Square Upper Limb Neurorehabilitation Course - a 2 day UCLPartners course, which started in 2013.
- He recently took on the role of a UCL MBBS Years 1-2 Personal Tutor (October 2015).
2007 | Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians | Royal College of Physicians | |
1994 | Member of the Royal College of Physicians | Royal College of Physicians | |
1986 | Bachelor of Science (Honours) | To be updated | |
ATQ09 - Other UK accreditation or qualification in teaching in the higher education sector | |||
Other Postgraduate qualification (including professional). | |||
1989 | Bachelor of Medicine/Bachelor of Surgery | To be updated |