In March, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) evolved to the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab (www.sralab.org). This move brings not only a change of location-to 355 East Erie, Chicago, Illinois 60611-but a new rehabilitation model. The facility is named after Northwestern University (NU) alum Shirley Ryan who, along with her husband and fellow NU alum, Pat Ryan, helped fund the state-of-the-art research hospital. The amount of the multimillion-dollar donation was not disclosed.
The AbilityLab provides care through five Innovation Centers, each of which focuses on an area of biomedical science with extraordinary promise: brain; spinal cord; nerve, muscle, and bone; pediatric; and cancer. The $550 million, 1.2-million-square-foot facility is said to be the first-ever translational research hospital in which clinicians, scientists, innovators, and technologists will work together in the same space, applying, or translating, research in real time-including limb loss and impairment and prosthetic research.
