David S. Tulsky, Ph.D. is the Vice-President of the Outcomes & Assessment Research and the Director of Spinal Cord Injury Research at Kessler Research Center. He is the Principal Investigator and Director of the Northern New Jersey Spinal Cord Injury System (NNJSCIS) and a Co-Investigator on the Northern New Jersey Traumatic Brain Injury System. He is also an Associate Professor in the Department of PM&R at UMDNJ-NJMS.

Dr. Tulsky received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Chicago with specializations in Clinical Psychology, Psychometrics, Research Methods, and Statistics. He also completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Health Psychology at Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center in Illinois.

Prior to his current work at Kessler Research Center, Dr. Tulsky directed the cognitive assessment research team at the Psychological Corporation, a division of Harcourt Assessments. He served as the lead Project Director for the most widely used cognitive scale in the world, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Third Edition (WAIS-III). He oversaw all aspects of the project, including the development of test items, pilot field testing and large scale standardization of the instrument, and the development of the normative information. In this role, Dr. Tulsky oversaw the data collection that included training of over 550 independent data collection examiners. He served as the lead author on both the Administration and Scoring Manual and the Technical Manual for the WAIS-III, Third Edition and has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, special journal issues, and a textbook on cognitive and memory testing using these instruments.

Dr. Tulsky also has extensive experience developing health related quality of life measures and psychosocial adjustment to spinal cord injury. He has co-authored more than 10 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters related to the measurement of quality of life. He has also served as the editor of two journal supplements of the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation devoted to the improvement of Quality of Life in Rehabilitation Medicine as well as organizing and chairing a special international conference on the topic.

Dr. Tulsky is the Principal Investigator of four projects related to the development of Quality of Life instruments for a rehabilitation population including three large multi-site collaborative research projects. One of these studies is an R-01 grant jointly funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development/National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research and the National Institute Of Neurological Disorders and Stroke). Dr. Tulsky also is the Co-PI of a Model SCI System Collaborative Study with Alan Jette of Boston University to develop a measure of Activity Limitation/Functional Activity. Finally, Dr. Tulsky is the PI of a NIDRR Field Initiated Research Grant to develop a HRQOL study for individuals with TBI and the PI of a collaborative TBI Model System study to collect a national, multi-site study of the TBI-QOL. Finally, he is collaborating with the Tampa VA to adapt the TBI quality of life instrument for use in VA populations with veterans who have suffered a TBI as a result of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.