National and International Roundtable

Constance Miller, completed her undergraduate work in social psychology at the University of Washington (UW). Her Master’s Degree in social psychology was undertaken in a program for social change activists known as Goddard-Cambridge Graduate School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It provided the academic foundation and rigor for my decades-long career of social activism. Having been raised in crushing poverty in the heart of Philadelphia, I knew full well the meaning of oppression and degradation.”

Following graduate school she pursued a brief career as an associate professor of women’s studies at the UW.  Subsequently, she took a job as a program analysis in an executive department of Seattle City Government.

She became a traumatic brain injury (TBI) Advocate more than thirty years ago following a motor vehicle collision that left her with permanent impairments from a moderate, TBI. “In an instant life as I had known it turned upside down. Suddenly, nothing made sense. Things that had been routine and familiar became strange and difficult. Alarmingly, I discovered that I had been transformed from a highly effectual, analytical thinker, to a confused and emotionally fragile person.”  She took what she learned and put it into a self-advocacy guide on brain injury.

She titled the book, FROM THE ASHES, because she felt that it reflected the destructive effects of brain injury in her life. Shortly after its publication she was recruited by the American Academy of Neurology to help them redesigned their guidelines for diagnosing and treating concussion in sports.