Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein

Co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul: Recovering from Traumatic Brain Injuries

Carolyn Roy-Bornstein is a practicing pediatrician who has been treating children and their families for twenty years. After working in emergency rooms and urban health centers, on staff at Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, she has been in private practice for the past five years.

Ten years ago, her son Neil was hit by a drunk driver in a crash that killed his girlfriend and left him with a serious traumatic brain injury. She spent the next several years monitoring his medications, transporting him to physical and mental health therapy sessions, and advocating for academic accommodations first at his high school and later at college. Combining her medical expertise as a doctor with her personal experience of being a caregiver to a TBI survivor, Dr. Roy-Bornstein has become a vocal advocate for the TBI community. As an Ambassador with the Brain Injury Association of Massachusetts, she speaks regularly to civic groups and businesses about TBI prevention and to high school and college students about the dangers of underage drinking and drunk driving. She also speaks frequently at health care conferences and trauma symposia, educating her medical colleagues in the recognition and management of concussion.

Finally, she uses her skills as an award-winning writer to spread the word about TBI. Her memoir Crash: A Mother, A Son, and the Journey from Grief to Gratitude was praised by Publishers Weekly as "a remarkable testament exploring one family’s journey through a medical nightmare and a new beginning." From her bimonthly health columns in the national newsletter Pediatrics for Parents to her essays in The Boston Globe and the Journal of the American Medical Association, she shares her knowledge, wisdom and her own family’s hopeful story of recovery from TBI. Dr. Roy-Bornstein is thrilled to be a part of this book, sending many other TBI stories out into the world.