Brooke Ellison, who was paralyzed from the neck down in a childhood car accident, went on to graduate from Harvard and become a professor and dedicated disability rights activist, died Sunday in Stony Brook, New York, at the age of 45.
Her death, at a hospital, was caused by complications of quadriplegia, said her mother, Jean Ellison.
As an 11-year-old, Brooke had taken karate, soccer, cello and dance lessons and sang in a church choir. But on September 4, 1990, she was hit by a car while running on a road near her Long Island home in Rockville Centre, Nassau County. Her skull, spine and almost every major bone in her body were fractured.
After waking up from a 36-hour coma, he spent six weeks in hospital and eight months in rehab. And for the rest of her life she depended on a wheelchair operated by a touch-tongue keyboard, a ventilator that delivered 13 breaths a minute, and eventually a voice-activated computer to type.
“If she had survived,” her mother said in a telephone interview, “at first we thought she would have no knowledge at all.”
But Brooke recovered better than expected. Her first words after waking up in the hospital were “When can I go back to school?” and “Will I be left behind?”
The following September, thanks to her mother’s constant care, she enrolled in the eighth grade and relentlessly challenged her prognosis—a life expectancy of perhaps 9 more years—until her death.
A talented student, she was accepted and given a full scholarship to Harvard, which subsidized her medical expenses. He graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in cognitive neuroscience in 2000 and delivered a commencement address. earned a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He was awarded a PhD in political psychology from Stony Brook University in 2012. and joined its faculty that year.
She also became a national spokesperson for people with disabilities and for stem cell research.
“One of the few guarantees in life is that it will never turn out the way we expect,” Ms. Ellison once said. “But instead of letting the events in our lives define who we are, we can make the decision to define the possibilities in our lives.”
Ms. Ellison did not fulfill her childhood dream: she hoped to emulate the career of astronomer Carl Sagan. But, her mother said, “We never expected her life to go the way it did, to have the opportunity to go to Harvard, have a full-time job and be able to contribute to the world.”
Dr. Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and Ms. Ellison’s colleague on the Empire State Stem Cell Board, an advisory group, said of her: “She would roll in her automated electric wheelchair. on the boardroom table and remind us that human lives were at stake, not just cells in petri dishes.”
Her life expectancy “would be about 8.6 years,” Dr. Klitzman said. “But with the help of her family, she defied those expectations.”
Brooke Mackenzie Ellison was born on October 20, 1978 in Rockville Center, New York to Edward and Jean (Derenze) Ellison. Her father was the director of the Social Security Administration. Her mother’s first and last day as a special education teacher was the day of Brooke’s accident.
She graduated with honors from Ward Melville High School in Stony Brook in 1996. Her mother was always by her side as her surrogate right hand — raising hers in the classroom when her daughter had something to contribute.
“I’m the mind,” Ms. Ellison told The New York Times in 2000. “It’s the brain.”
Ms. Ellison stayed with her daughter at Harvard, where the college furnished a dormitory suite with a hospital bed, hydraulic lift and other equipment. Mr. Ellison looked after Brooke’s older sister, Kisten, and younger brother, Reed, at home and visited his wife and Brooke on weekends.
Her dissertation was titled “The Element of Hope in Resilient Adolescents.”
In 2006, Ms. Ellison ran for the New York State Senate from Long Island as a Democrat, but was defeated by the Republican incumbent, John J. Flanagan.
In 2009, he collaborated with filmmaker James Siegel to produce “Hope Deferred,” a documentary film intended to educate the public about embryonic stem cell research, which can produce specialized cells that are experimentally guided to create healthy cells to replace. those damaged by disease.
At Stony Brook, Ms. Ellison taught medical and scientific ethics and health policy.
“In 1990 we were living at a time when people in situations like mine weren’t necessarily embraced by society, and the road to understanding was just beginning to be paved,” she told The Times in 2005, reflecting on the accident that changed her. ZOE.
“I didn’t want people to focus on what I had lost in my life, but what I still had in my life.”
“Thankfully,” he continued, “my accident did not rob me of my ability to think, reason or remain a vital part of society. My body wasn’t responding, but my mind and heart were the same as they always were.”
