Christopher Nowinski

Co-Founder & Executive Director of Concussion Legacy Foundation

National Advisory Board

Chris Nowinski, Ph.D., is the founding CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation and a social entrepreneur leading a global conversation on concussions, CTE, and the future of sports. After an All-Ivy football career at Harvard, he became a WWE professional wrestler until a 2003 kick to the chin in a tag-team match caused career-ending post-concussion syndrome. Researching how to recover, he discovered how the NFL was playing a Big Tobacco-like role promoting a narrative minimizing the risks of concussions, so he exposed the concussion coverup in Head Games: Football’s Concussion Crisis in 2006.
After co-founding the Concussion Legacy Foundation in 2007, which now operates in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, Dr. Nowinski co-founded UNITE Brain Bank at the Boston University CTE Center. Dr. Nowinski earned his Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from Boston University School of Medicine in 2017 and has authored more than 50 scientific publications. He serves as an advisor to the NFL Players Association and the Ivy League. VICE Sports called Dr. Nowinski “the man most responsible for making CTE part of the national conversation,” and Sports Illustrated said, “it is Nowinski’s figure which looms behind the doctors and the headlines and the debate roiling over sports’ newfound commitment to minimizing head trauma.”