As personal injury lawyers our work often takes us deep into the medical details of the different injuries we are helping our clients address in their cases. Few specialty areas are more complex than traumatic brain injury, so we were impressed when we ran across an article in the Reston Connection about Eduard Danalache, a high school senior from Vienna who was chosen as a semi-finalist in this year’s Intel Science Talent Search for his ground-breaking work on mild traumatic brain injuries. Mild TBI currently accounts for over 80 percent of the traumatic brain injury diagnoses, but it is a very broad categorization, as we have noticed in our own work.

Through an internship with the Department of Defense’s National Intrepid Center of Excellence, Eduard worked with researchers to analyze injury clusters and develop four new subcategories of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, each denoting a different level of severity. As the medical community and parents everywhere grapple with a new awareness about the dangers of concussion, we couldn’t help but tip our hat to a student from the Fairfax County Public Schools who is helping develop some of the tools to guide the way.