Brian L. Edlow, M.D.

Principal Investigator and Director

My interest in understanding mechanisms of coma recovery began with a formative experience in medical school. I was examining a young man who had been comatose for 14 days after getting hit by a car, and on morning rounds he unexpectedly squeezed my hand to verbal command for the first time, indicating the transition from coma to consciousness. This moment of reemergence of consciousness continues to inspire my clinical and research work, which is focused on detecting, predicting and promoting recovery of consciousness in patients with severe traumatic brain injury. I have been fortunate to be guided by a team of multidisciplinary mentors who trained me in neurocritical care, disorders of consciousness, traumatic brain injury, neuroimaging and neuropathology. My lab, the MGH Laboratory for NeuroImaging of Coma and Consciousness, now uses complementary behavioral, imaging, electrophysiology, and histopathological analyses to identify the brain network connections that are essential for recovery of consciousness in comatose patients. Our work has been funded continuously since 2010 by the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, and multiple foundations. We envision a future in which every patient with a severe traumatic brain injury is given a personalized prognosis and receives targeted therapies based on individualized brain network maps.