Seeking Founding Board Members
The personality changes. The emotional free-fall. The person in the mirror who doesn’t feel like you anymore. There is no system — anywhere — for the emotional and identity recovery that follows brain injury. No screening. No AI. No infrastructure. The Still You Foundation is building all of it. And we’re looking for the people who want to be there at the beginning.
The gap in care
The human cost: A mother survives brain surgery and comes home to her family. She’s alive — but she can’t regulate her emotions. She doesn’t feel like herself. Her relationships fracture. Her kids don’t understand. There is no tool, no program, no professional waiting to help her with this. She is on her own.
The system failure: 5–10 month waitlists for neuropsychological evaluation. By then, depression and anxiety have deepened roots. Marriages end. Careers collapse. The window for early intervention closes — and nobody even opened it.
This is what we’re here to change.
Three programs
A comprehensive ecosystem designed by a neurosurgeon, informed by patient testimony, powered by AI.
An AI companion purpose-built for brain injury populations. Not a generic chatbot. Built on Pearl — a proprietary AI facilitator with 146K+ knowledge entries, hybrid retrieval (BM25 + PubMedBERT + Neo4j), hippocampal memory architecture, and epistemically tiered knowledge. Three population tracks: craniotomy, stroke, TBI.
In developmentA novel 35-item screening instrument designed to catch what PHQ-9 and GAD-7 miss in brain surgery patients. Captures identity disruption, emotional dysregulation, and relational strain that standard tools ignore. Validation roadmap modeled on the MoCA pathway.
Entering validationTwo books published: Still You for brain surgery (16 chapters) and Still You for stroke. Free companion website at stillyourecovery.com. TBI edition in development. Discharge pamphlets and caregiver guides.
PublishedThe science
Brain injury doesn’t cause generic “sadness.” It damages specific circuits that produce specific deficits. ARIA is designed to address each one.
What’s already built
Still You brain surgery & stroke editions. 16 chapters. Available now.
stillyourecovery.com — live with educational content and recovery resources.
146K+ knowledge entries. Hybrid retrieval. Hippocampal memory. 48 tools. Two years of development.
35-item screening tool with full validation roadmap and IRB protocol designed.
50+ citations mapping TBI neurobiology to AI-driven intervention design.
Active across four Southern California hospitals — ARMC, RUHS, RCH, EMC.
Founded by
Dr. Whitney operates on brains for a living. He sees the tissue damage, the edema, the lesions. But over years in neurosurgery, he learned that the physical recovery is only half the story. The other half — the emotional, relational, identity-based recovery — is what actually determines whether a patient rebuilds their life or remains trapped in post-injury dysregulation.
The Still You Foundation emerged from that conviction: the brain injury recovery ecosystem is missing the emotional piece entirely. No tools. No screening. No infrastructure. So he built one — starting with two books, a screening instrument, and an AI system designed from the ground up to fill the gap.
Peer-reviewed research on TBI, cerebral aneurysms, and neurological effects of music and binaural beats. Neurosurgical residency at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center and Desert Regional Medical Center.
Founding board
Ground-floor board seats at a neurosurgeon-led research foundation with a clear path to federal funding (NINDS, DOD CDMRP) and publication.
Eric Whitney, DO. Board-certified neurosurgeon. Pearl architect.
FilledParis Whitney, DO. Gut-brain axis, hormonal recovery, nutritional neuroplasticity.
FilledPCRES validation partner. Brain injury rehabilitation expertise.
Co-PI on validation study. First-author publication opportunity.
SeekingHealthcare AI, LLM-based therapeutic agents, responsible deployment.
Access to novel longitudinal AI dataset. Named research collaboration.
SeekingLived experience of emotional recovery after brain injury.
Shape a national program from its founding. Advisory voice on patient experience.
Seeking501(c)(3) compliance, research ethics, grant administration.
Ground-floor governance of a research foundation targeting federal funding.
SeekingDetailed program plans, research designs, financial projections, and a live demonstration of Pearl are available on request.