Under the leadership of Kristen Dams-O’Connor, PhD, the Brain Injury Research Center has made significant strides in understanding, preventing, treating, and improving outcomes in patients who are living with traumatic brain injury.
Kristen Dams-O'Connor, PhD, a clinical neuropsychologist and neurotraumatologist, is Director of the Brain Injury Research Center of Mount Sinai and a Professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine and the Department of Neurology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical neuropsychology at The Mount Sinai Medical Center, and a predoctoral internship in neurorehabilitation at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University Medical Center. She earned her PhD from the University at Albany and her BA in Neuroscience from Colgate University.
Dr. Dams-O’Connor has published over 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts and chapters on traumatic brain injury treatments and outcomes, and she has presented her research internationally. Her primary area of research expertise is the investigation of long-term outcomes after brain injury to identify the clinical phenotypes and pathological signatures of post-traumatic neurodegeneration. Her clinical expertise is in neuropsychological assessment and neurocognitive remediation for individuals with neurological diseases.
Dr. Dams-O’Connor’s research aims to improve health, longevity, and quality of life for survivors of traumatic brain injury (TBI). She strives to identify factors that impact acute and long-term outcomes after TBI. She has worked closely with multi-institutional, interdisciplinary teams from a number of centers to spearhead investigations into factors associated with trajectories of cognition, health, and functioning with moderate to severe TBI. She is the Project Director of the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR)-funded New York TBI Model System of Care at Mount Sinai and Principal Investigator of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Late Effects of TBI (LETBI) Brain donor program and the NIH-funded Leveraging Existing Aging Research Networks to investigate TBI and AD/ADRD Risk (LEARN TBI-AD) project.
Her current projects focus on applying modern psychometric and statistical techniques to measure individual differences in trajectories of change over time among survivors of TBI. Dr. Dams-O’Connor’s research is supported currently by federal grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute for Disability Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research, the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and the Department of Defense.