Kristen Dams-O'connor, PhD

Kristen Dams-O’Connor, Ph.D. is the Director of the Brain Injury Research Center (BIRC) of Mount Sinai, an internationally recognized program for traumatic brain injury (TBI) research and care. She is the Jack Nash Professor and Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Rehabilitation and Human Performance, and Professor of Neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS). She completed a BA in Neuroscience at Colgate University, a PhD at the University at Albany, and predoctoral training at the Rusk Institute at NYU. She completed postdoctoral fellowship in clinical neuropsychology and brain injury research and joined the faculty at ISMMS as an Assistant Professor in 2011.

Dr. Dams-O’Connor’s multidisciplinary program of research aims to improve long-term outcomes in individuals with TBI and repetitive head impacts sustained through sports, military service, and intimate partner violence (IPV). She leads multiple large-scale federally funded multicenter studies investigating the chronic health sequelae of TBI. The NIH-funded Late Effects of TBI (LETBI) project is a longitudinal prospective TBI brain donor program that aims to characterize the clinical phenotype and postmortem pathological signatures of post-traumatic neurodegeneration to facilitate in-vivo diagnostics. The ‘Leveraging Existing Aging Research Networks to understand associations of TBI and Alzheimer’s Disease (LEARN TBI-AD)’ project aims to harmonize data across 5 of the largest longitudinal studies of cognitive aging in the United States to investigate associations of TBI with AD and related dementias (ADRDs). The DoD-funded ENRICH Brain Health Focused Program Award spans 5 research projects investigating clinical and pathological signatures of post-traumatic neurodegeneration, psychological health decline, and suicide risk in civilians and Veterans with TBI. The NIDILRR-funded New York Traumatic Brain Injury Model System of care is one of 16 centers of excellence for TBI research and clinical care in the United States.

Dr. Dams-O’Connor has led and/or served on the Steering Committees of initiatives such as the NIH ADRD Summit (2019, 2022, 2025), the committee to develop Postmortem Neurotrauma Common Data Elements, the NIH TBI Classification and Nomenclature initiative, and she has served as a subject matter expert to the U.S. Secretary of the Army. She has authored over 200 scientific publications and is the recipient of awards for her research, mentorship, and brain injury advocacy.