Insistent (The Powerful Bond that Fueled a Global Fight for Inclusion)

When you mix systemic bias, discrimination, and neuroscience academia with a determined, brain-injured woman and a service dog, you get a powerhouse team of science influencers.

Insistent chronicles a woman’s fight to find meaning and regain her life after a horrific accident where she broke twenty-three bones and suffered a traumatic brain injury. In constant pain, unable to filter environmental stimuli or comprehend spoken language, and having lost the ability to speak, she isolated herself, living in an abyss of darkness and hopelessness. The darkness laughed at her, feeding on her pain and confusion, telling her she was a burden to everyone.

Faced with immeasurable adversity—and the decision whether to live or end it all—she chose to fight and find meaning in her life, but first, she must find hope. Hope she found in the eyes of a fluffy white Golden retriever with soft brown eyes, named Sampson.

Wanting to understand what was happening in her brain and rebuild her life, she embarked on an educational journey in neuroscience. Doing so after a traumatic brain injury was ambitious. Doing so with a service dog was unprecedented as service dogs were not allowed in science laboratories.

Refusing to allow an academic system to break her spirit and make her “just go away,” as many hoped she would, she used their resistance and opposition to fuel an entire movement, changing policy and culture in science education across the globe with Sampson the Service Dog in Science by her side.