Ann McKee, MD, William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Boston University School of Medicine

“I’ve always followed my heart and followed what interested me,” says Dr. Ann McKee, a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of Neurology at Boston University School of Medicine. “I didn’t always know why.” 

Having studied neurodegeneration for nearly two decades, she gained access to the brain of Paul Pender, a prominent boxer from Massachusetts who had been thought to have Alzheimer’s disease. “Inspection of his brain revealed the most florid tauopathy I had ever encountered,” McKee says, referring to a type of protein aggregation found in a diseased human brain. These patterns of protein tangles suggested that Alzheimer’s disease had not been the right diagnosis. 

Unlike any tangles McKee had seen before and not well reported in scientific literature, the ones she found in Pender’s brain have come to be the hallmark of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

“In science, we get so caught up in paradigms of thought, they can condition you to find only what you expect,” she says. “You have to free your mind from this boxed-in thinking.”

Since then, McKee has studied the brains of other boxers, football players, and military veterans under her microscope. With a 40-member team that covers the spectrum from clinician to graduate student, McKee has put together a repository of 1,250 brains — all from people who experienced head trauma during their lifetimes. 

McKee’s research has shown that CTE is linked to repeated head trauma, with longer durations of football play greatly increasing the odds of developing brain injury. Symptoms of the condition include depression, memory loss, and dementia. In a prominent paper on the condition, McKee reported finding signs of CTE in 99% of the brains of former football players obtained from the National Football League.

Through relationships cultivated with the families of brain donors, McKee’s lab aligns information about their lives and neuropathological abnormalities. “We are spurred on by a deep commitment to prevent, diagnose during life, and treat this terrible disease — and lessen the suffering we see every day,” she says.

McKee’s work on the brain trauma linked with a variety of sports has been “challenged by billion-dollar industries,” she says. But even as McKee has faced harassment, her team has persisted by publishing quality research papers and continued to receive funding and awards. “I’m proud of all the awards because I’ve faced so much aggressive dismissal, denial, and denigration along the way,” she says. “The awards prop me up and give me the stamina to keep going.”