2021 Edward Lowman Award
ACRM is pleased to honor Kristen Dams-O’Connor, PhD, FACRM with the 2021 Edward Lowman Award. The Award was established in 1989 in honor of Edward Lowman, MD, and recognizes ACRM members whose careers reflect an energetic promotion of the spirit of interdisciplinary rehabilitation. Dr. Dams-O’Connor is Director of the Brain Injury Research Center of Mount Sinai and Professor in the Departments of Rehabilitation Medicine and Neurology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. This award will be presented during the ACRM 2021 VIRTUAL Annual Conference.
MORE ABOUT KRISTEN DAMS-O’CONNOR
Kristen Dams-O’Connor, PhD, FACRM is Director of the Brain Injury Research Center of Mount Sinai and Professor in the Departments of Rehabilitation Medicine and Neurology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, NY. She conducts multidisciplinary research dedicated to improving the lives of people living with brain injury. Her work 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.
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. She leads the Late Effects of TBI (LETBI) Project, a TBI brain donor program focused on characterizing the clinical phenotype and postmortem pathological signatures of post-traumatic neurodegeneration and their associations with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
Dr. Dams-O’Connor is 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. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts and chapters on TBI treatments and outcomes, and has presented her research internationally.
