Dr. Phillip Popovich began his relationship with the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation in 2012 as a member of the SCIRTS Review Board. In July 2019, he was appointed to the Foundation’s Board of Directors.

Phil has spent his entire professional career at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. There, he completed his PhD training in Physiology and Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) then, as a post-doctoral fellow, Phil was awarded a competitive Sandoz Research Fellowship to support his formal training in immunology and CNS autoimmune disease. In 2006, he was appointed by Ohio State as the Ray W. Poppleton Research Designated Endowed Chair. In his lab, he has been making seminal contributions to the field of neuroscience and is internationally renowned for doing innovative and rigorous research, especially in the sub-disciplines of neurotrauma and neuroimmunology.

Beyond the Ohio State community, he is a member of several national and international advisory boards for foundations and organizations that support SCI research, patient advocacy and policy development. He also serves on the editorial board of various scientific journals. Phil has received numerous awards to recognize his scientific accomplishments. In 2013, he was inducted as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and two years later was appointed as a member of the Faculty of 1000. Phil received the David F. Apple, Jr. Award from the American Spinal Injury Association in 2017 and in 2019 he was awarded an R35 Outstanding Investigator Award from NIH-NINDS that will fund his research lab through 2027.

Phil is currently Professor and Chair of OSU’s Department of Neuroscience. He also serves as Director of the Center for Brain and Spinal Cord Repair, Executive Director of the Belford Center for Spinal Cord Injury and Co-Director of the Neurological Research Institute. In 2018, he was named a Distinguished University Scholar.