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New Neurology Chair named at Yale

Dr. David A. Hafler was named Chief and Chair of Neurology at Yale–New Haven Hospital effective September 1, 2009. Prior to this appointment, Hafler was the Director of Molecular Immunology in the Department of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. He was also the Jack, Sadie, and David Breakstone Professor of Neurology (Neuroscience) at Harvard and a neurologist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital.

At Yale, Dr. Hafler will be charged with expanding the clinical area of the Department, especially in the area of multiple sclerosis (MS) research. “I'm excited to be able to translate Yale's excellence in science to the development of new therapies and to understanding disease,” he said. He also commented on the key factors in his decision to come to Yale, including the quality of the Yale School of Medicine's faculty; the opportunities for creative, collaborative research; and the resources the school is able to offer. Hafler said one of his first recruitment priorities will be to find new leadership for the neurology side of the Yale School of Medicine's epilepsy program. School of Medicine professor Susan Spencer died unexpectedly on May 23 from complications of an acute intestinal illness. At the time, the world-renowned researcher and physician was serving as co-director with her husband, Dennis Spencer, the chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at the medical school.

Dr. Hafler was among the first to apply human T-cell cloning to human disease helping to define the targets of the activated immune cells in patients with MS. More recently, Hafler became an associate member of the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT and founded an international collaboration with scientists from the University of Cambridge and the University of California, San Francisco. The group led an initiative to solve the genetic basis of MS, culminating in the first whole …