Introducing Our Director of Brain Injury Research - Dr. Dams-O'Connor

 This week we are introducing Dr. Kristen Dams-O'Connor, the new director of the Brain Injury Research Center of Mount Sinai who specialises in traumatic brain injuries (TBI), and more specifically, the recovery process of TBI patients.

When beginning college at Colgate University, Dr. Dams-O'Connor intended to major in international relations; however, after taking an introductory course in neuroscience she was hooked, and chose instead to major in this field. Her research began in controlled laboratory experiments and she fell in love with the accuracy and certainty with which she could observe cause-and-effect relationships in her studies.

Following her undergraduate degree in neuroscience, Dr. Dams-O'Connor decided to do further studies in psychology so she could work more closely with patients who were living with neurological diseases. During her doctoral studies she worked at a clinical site for three years at the University at Albany , participating in programs that helped people with devastating brain diseases live more productive and meaningful lives.

Moving to New York, she carried out an internship in neurorehabilitation at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University Medical Center. On completion of the internship she progressed to a fellowship in Clinical Neuropsychology at Mount Sinai. During this Dr. Dams-O'Connor began to focus her research more on TBI, taking an interest in the heterogeneous nature of these injuries, with no two cases being alike. This variability allowed her to apply her knowledge of empirically supported neurobehavioral interventions to unique individual cases.

Today, as well as being a director, Dr. Dams-O'Connor is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine, and the Director of Research. She is PI of two grants from the National Institutes of Health and Co-Project Director of the New York Traumatic Brain Injury Model System which, as well as carrying out research on brain trauma, also provides emergency medical services, acute care, rehabilitation services, and long-term outpatient care. In her career to date she has published over 60 peer-reviewed manuscripts and chapters on traumatic brain injuries, their treatments, and outcomes and her work is internationally recognised. In her current research Dr. Dams-O'Connor works primarily on studying the long-term outcomes of brain injuries including clinicopathological signatures of TBI. A key interest of hers is understanding why some patients display a full recovery after their injuries while others partially recover before regressing later in life.

You can read more about the Brain Injury Research Center here - www.tbicentral.org