Dr. Sahana N. Kukke's research has focused on developing methods to assess and improve functional movements in individuals with early brain injury and she is the progenitor of infant grasp research at Catholic University where she served as an Associate Research Professor of Biomedical Engineering until 2019. She currently serves as Program Director in the Repair and Plasticity Cluster in the Division of Neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NINDS.

Dr. Kukke earned her B.S. from Northwestern University (1999), and M.S. from Case Western Reserve University (2002) in Biomedical Engineering. She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University (2009) in Bioengineering, and completed a 3-year post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Kukke has over 20 years of research experience studying human sensorimotor control in various settings, including outpatient neurology and rehabilitation clinics and research laboratories at Children's National Health System, the National Institutes of Health, Stanford University, and Case Western Reserve University. She has presented her work at the annual meetings for the American Academy of Cerebral Palsy and Development, the Neural Control of Movement society, and the Society for Neuroscience. In addition, she has 25 peer-reviewed scientific publications on the topic of movement disorders, rehabilitation, and clinical neurophysiology. Dr. Kukke conceived and was the first Principal Investigator on project R1, "Home assessment of grasp development in infants at risk for fine motor delay" in this Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center.