Navy to
neuroscience

Bennett’s interest in studying TBI is grounded in personal experience. She served six years in the U.S. Navy as a nuclear chemist on an aircraft carrier deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Service has been what my whole life is about; it’s why I joined in the first place,” she said.

Bennett sits in an MH-60R helicopter during her 2003 deployment on the flight deck of the USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) (photo taken in the South China Sea).

Responsible for mechanical systems and chemistry in the reactor and its support systems — one of the few women in a newly integrated field — Bennett often engaged with contaminated personnel, decontaminating those exposed to radioactivity before they could receive medical treatment. She was exposed to toxic burn pits, ionizing radiation and accidents such as the ventilation being turned off while using hazardous chemicals aboard the carrier.

By age 28, Bennett suffered several mini-strokes and lost function on her right side. By age 40, she developed multiple autoimmune disorders, lost 40% of her lung capacity and faced additional health issues. She now has a 90% disability rating for service-connected conditions and has spent years recovering — relearning how to talk, walk and do math.

She describes the different treatments she underwent as “horrific.” Physically, Bennett’s head was in massive pain and her body felt nauseous. Emotionally, she couldn’t feel or she would feel too much. Socially, it was hard to make connections with people and to simply function in life. She gained firsthand insight into what a brain injury feels like.

She says her experience rewired her to think differently, to process in a new way. “I learned that while strokes aren’t the same as a traumatic brain injury (TBI), the treatments for them are the same: There is no direct drug treatment,” she said.

The lack of pharmaceutical treatments for TBI costs the U.S. healthcare industry $40 billion annually. With 1.5 million new TBIs each year in the U.S. alone, Bennett was driven to deepen her understanding of these injuries.

Veterans with TBI are 22 times more likely to die from a health condition than the general population. Holding this urgency, Bennett approached the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs with an idea for a sensor study on mixed martial arts fighters to measure forces on the brain. The VA offered her a full scholarship and a salary from the vocational rehabilitation program. After completing her prerequisites at Seattle Colleges, Bennett transferred to the UW.

Bennett highlights two key components as integral to her Husky Experience: Undergraduate research opportunities unique to the University of Washington and the supportive environment she found in the Department of Chemical Engineering.

Dr. Elizabeth Nance, an expert in living tissue brain injury models and therapeutic development, and Dr. Tommy Wood, an expert in TBI injury, examine a brain slice from the surface acoustic wave injury model.Photo by Jayden Becles

The Nance Lab is one of the few in the world that performs the multiple-particle tracking technique in living tissue, a method for tracking hundreds of probes simultaneously in brain tissue at high speed and sub-micron resolution. The goal is to probe the brain parenchyma, the functional tissue of the brain, to understand both how it acts as a barrier to therapeutic drug delivery and how it changes in response to stimuli and treatment.

When Bennett expressed interest in advancing therapeutic options for TBI, Nance and her collaborator Dr. Thomas Ragnar Wood, an associate professor of pediatrics in UW Medicine, felt it was an excellent match.

Once Bennett mastered particle tracking, she honed her expertise under the guidance of graduate mentor Brendan Butler, analyzing alterations of brain microstructures and co-authoring a research paper for publication. Bennett’s contributions helped earn her a prestigious Washington Research Foundation Fellowship in 2023 so that she could continue pushing the boundaries of her field. At the forefront of her innovation was the adaptation of the Nance slice model, where she explored the mechanics and physics of the process.

“Kristin identified a potentially alternative, more controllable, and tunable way to introduce injury — through acoustic waves,” wrote Nance and Wood in an email. “She demonstrated that one could apply acoustic waves to elicit a response, laying the foundation for her ongoing research — the surface acoustic wave model.”

Bennett plans to continue her work at the Nance Lab through graduate school, applying drugs to the models she is developing to track how they affect each situation. There have been 138 clinical trials for TBI since 2004, and every one has failed. She envisions one day advancing her research to clinical trials to impact millions of people.

At left, Sydney Floryanzia, a Ph.D. candidate in the Nance lab, helps Bennett identify brain regions while imaging a brain slice on a confocal microscope. At right, Kristin and Assistant Teaching Professor Dr. Alexis Prybutok in the Chemical Engineering Unit Operations Laboratory where they show students how to assess wet lab spaces for accessibility and give disability awareness training.Photos by Jayden Becles