In this episode of Imperfect Leaders, host Jeff Cohn sits down with Dr. Bradley Schlaggar — physician, neuroscientist, and President and CEO of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, one of the world's premier institutions for children and young adults with disorders of the brain and nervous system.

Brad's path to leadership began with a lifelong obsession with the developing brain, an MD and PhD from Washington University, and nearly two decades on the faculty building a celebrated research career.

But it was a series of deeply personal crucible experiences — the loss of his sister and father to cancer, his own emergency heart surgery, his wife's breast cancer diagnosis, and his son Simeon's four-year battle with leukemia — that forged his most important leadership qualities.

Those experiences gave Brad something no training program could: a profound, bone-deep empathy for the families sitting across from him, and a servant leader's instinct to make space for others rather than occupy it himself.

That empathy and humility are not incidental to how Kennedy Krieger works — they are the foundation of it. Brad has built a culture where world-class specialists in neurology, psychiatry, behavioral health, and education are not just housed under one roof but genuinely work together, centered entirely on the patient and family in front of them.

In this conversation, Brad takes us inside that culture — how it is built, how it is sustained, and why true interdisciplinary care produces outcomes that siloed systems simply cannot.

He also speaks with remarkable candor about what parents of children with autism and developmental differences actually need, what the system consistently gets wrong, and what business leaders with real capital and influence can do right now to move the needle for these families — inside their companies and in their communities.

This episode will resonate deeply with any parent who has ever sat in a waiting room terrified, and with any leader who has learned — the hard way — that the most powerful thing you can do is get out of the way of the people around you.

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Thinking About Thinking: What a World-Class Neuroscientist Learned When His Own Child Got Sick, with Dr. Bradley Schlaggar, CEO of the Kennedy Krieger Institute

Imperfect Leaders

Thinking About Thinking: What a World-Class Neuroscientist Learned When His Own Child Got Sick, with Dr. Bradley Schlaggar, CEO of the Kennedy Krieger Institute