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Kristen Dams-O'Connor, PhD

Jack Nash Professor and Vice Chair; Director of Brain Injury Research
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
New York, New York, United States

Kristen Dams-O’Connor, Ph.D. is Jack Nash Professor and Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Rehabilitation and Human Performance at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) in New York, NY. She serves as Director of the Brain Injury Research Center (BIRC) of Mount Sinai and is a Professor of Neurology at ISMMS. Her multidisciplinary research program aims to identify mechanisms, risk, and protective factors to improve long-term outcomes in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and repetitive head trauma sustained through sports participation, military service, and intimate partner violence. She leads the Late Effects of TBI (LETBI) project, a longitudinal prospective TBI brain donor program that aims to characterize the clinical phenotype and postmortem pathological signatures of post-traumatic neurodegeneration and its associations with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), AD-related dementias (ADRDs), traumatic encephalopathy syndrome (TES), and underlying neuropathological processes. Her team uses modern psychometric and statistical techniques to measure individual differences in trajectories of change over time among survivors of TBI. One goal of this work is to improve diagnosis of secondary post-traumatic conditions during life so they can be treated. Dr. Dams-O’Connor leads the ENRICH Brain Health study, a Department of Defense-funded Focused Program Award comprised of 5 research projects investigating clinical and pathological signatures of post-traumatic neurodegeneration and psychological health decline in a context of community-based participatory research. She is also Project Director of the New York Traumatic Brain Injury Model System of care, one of 16 centers of excellence for TBI research and clinical care in the United States. Her research is supported by federal grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute for Disability Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research, Department of Defense, Centers for Disease Control, and Patient Reported Outcomes Research Institute.

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