Andrew Worthy

Andrew Worthy

PhD Researcher & Data Scientist Python · ML · Signal Processing

Received the ART 2026 Award for 3R Research

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I’m incredibly honored to share that I have been selected as a recipient of the ART Awards for 2026 from Animal Research Tomorrow.

The ART 3R Award supports early-career researchers whose work advances the “3R” principles of Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement in animal research. My awarded project, “Quantifying Spinal Inhibition to Strengthen Computational Models of Motor Control,” focuses on understanding how inhibitory spinal circuits help coordinate movement while also improving how we design and interpret animal experiments.

In my dissertation work, I study how Renshaw cells and Ia inhibitory interneurons regulate communication between antagonist motor pools, such as ankle flexors and extensors. These circuits are central to reflex control, posture, and movement stability, but many computational models of spinal motor control still lack the quantitative physiological data needed to constrain their predictions. This project aims to help close that gap by measuring how spinal inhibitory circuits shape reflex output and using those data to strengthen biologically grounded models of motor control.

The long-term 3R goal is to make future experiments more targeted and efficient. Better models can allow researchers to test circuit hypotheses in silico before moving to animal experiments, reducing exploratory animal use over time. The project also supports reduction by sharing animal cohorts with a complementary study in my lab and supports refinement by improving the stability and reproducibility of terminal spinal cord physiology preparations.

I’m grateful to Animal Research Tomorrow for supporting this work and for highlighting projects that take animal welfare, experimental rigor, and computational alternatives seriously. I’m also looking forward to the virtual ART Conference on July 22, 2026, where the award ceremony will take place and I will briefly introduce my project.

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