Elizabeth Sandel, MD

Elizabeth Sandel, MD, has decades of experience providing care for people with brain injuries and other neurological disorders and is the author of Shaken Brain: The Science, Care, and Treatment of Concussion. She is board-certified in physical medicine and rehabilitation and brain injury medicine. She is a medical director for Paradigm, an organization based in Walnut Creek, California, that has provided medical case management for catastrophically injured workers for more than 25 years. 

Since 1998, she has been a volunteer Clinical Professor in the Department of PM&R at the University of California Davis School of Medicine. Dr. Sandel has practiced medicine in healthcare systems on the East and West Coast, including the Jefferson Health System, the University of Pennsylvania Health System, and Kaiser Permanente. From 1997 to 2013, she was Chief of PM&R, for the Kaiser Permanente Napa Solano Service Area. She also served as Medical Director of the Kaiser Foundation Rehabilitation Center in Vallejo, California. 

Her research on brain injury and stroke has been supported with funding from Kaiser Permanente, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Sandel served on the American Academy of PM&R Board of Governors for eight years and as President from 2009-2010. In 2012, the AAPM&R awarded her the Krusen Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Dr. Sandel continues to educate the public about brain injury through publications and her website. Her book, Shaken Brain: The Science, Care, and Treatment of Concussion (Harvard University Press, 2020), is a resource for patients and others who want to understand these injuries to the brain and what interventions can help. Dr. Sandel completed a PM&R residency at Thomas Jefferson University in 1984 and a fellowship in Brain Injury Rehabilitation at Magee Rehabilitation Hospital in 1985.