Dear Friends and Colleagues:

We are grateful for all the hard work of our UNMC administrative staff and for our affiliations with Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals, Children’s Nebraska, the VA Nebraska-Western Iowa HealthCare, and Nebraska Medicine. Our sixteen residents are eagerly engaged in developing their clinical skills through these rotations at our affiliated hospitals. Our clinical volume continues to grow as our hospital consultative services develop and Madonna inpatient volume grows. We are grateful for the recent addition of Dr. Alex D’Angelo to our faculty in February of this year. He has brought his enthusiasm in ultrasound instruction and increased this interest among the residents, and he has expanded our services at our Village Pointe Nebraska Medicine clinic and consultative services.

We added our new pediatric physiatrist, Seella Nimmo, MD, in September. Seella is another UNMC PM&R graduate who did her fellowship at the University of Michigan. She works at Children’s Nebraska and at the Madonna pediatric inpatient unit providing pediatric consultative and outpatient services. She will continue to develop spasticity and outpatient programs at Children’s. We appreciate Kody Moffatt, MD who is the acting chief of service for pediatric PM&R at Children’s and assists Dr. Nimmo with the administrative needs she has there.

We are expanding our faculty next year with the addition of a medical director position in the Nebraska Medicine spasticity clinic. Dr. Anna Woods, a graduate of our UNMC residency program, will complete her fellowship in brain injury medicine from Baylor Scott and White Hospitals (Dallas) in June and join our department in September 2025. She will work both at Madonna and at the Nebraska Medicine spasticity clinic.

Our collaboration with University of Nebraska Omaha Biomechanics faculty and graduate students has expanded to include work with Madonna Research Institute in the MRH-Omaha research space with Brian Knarr, PhD from UNO and the help of Jacob Massey, DPT, and Arash Gonabadi, PhD of Madonna Research Institute and with the assistance of Judith Burnfield, PT, PhD, who is Director of the Research Institute in Lincoln.

We look forward to another successful residency match in March 2025. We will have interviewed some 80 applicants for our residency program by January. We appreciate the help of all the faculty and residents who have been involved in this lengthy interview season. We are grateful for all the faculty members in the other services who teach our residents as they progress through our program.



Best wishes for a healthy and successful New Year! 

Samuel Bierner, MD, MRM

Professor and Chair

Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation