Brainwaves

"I am coming to Yale School of Medicine from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to build a transformative Center for Precision Neurology focused on Parkinson’s disease and related brain diseases. I am excited to launch the new Stephen and Denise Adams Center for Parkinson’s Research at YSM as inaugural director and to serve as the academic chief of the movement disorders division and Stephen and Denise Adams Professor of Neurology.

My dream is to develop a healthcare of the future for Parkinson’s disease that is predictive and precise: a future, where we will forecast a patient’s disease progression using predictive analytics and where we will prevent disabling complications from ever occurring by intervening ahead of time with targeted therapeutics. In order to identify genetic drivers, precision therapeutics and tailored biomarkers, we are systematically mapping the DNA and RNA software of 1 million brain cells and thousands of patients.

I am a mountain man, raised in the Alps and Dolomites. When the mountains are calling, my family loves to answer and hopes to summit forty 4,000-footers in the White Mountains over the coming years."

"I am very excited to be a part of the Department of Neurology at YSM!

I completed my neurology residency at Emory University and my vascular neurology fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and I then joined the faculty in the Department of Neurology at Emory University in 2014. I established my research laboratory at Emory in 2015.

Our research has focused on exploring immune-mediated mechanisms of neurodegeneration and post-ischemic injury in the brain, leveraging pre-clinical mouse models, as well as multi-omics modalities to assess molecular changes occurring in diverse classes of neurons and glial cells. We have identified promising targets to modulate microglia-mediated mechanisms in neurodegeneration and stroke, as well as developed novel in vivo labeling tools to assess protein-level (proteomic) mechanisms of disease that are unique to different brain cell types. We have an emerging interest in proteomics-based discovery of plasma biomarkers in ischemic stroke.

On the clinical front, I am a stroke/vascular neurologist, and look forward to providing patient care in in-patient and clinic-based settings. I am passionate about mentoring clinical and non-clinical trainees at all levels.

As a two-career physician-scientist couple, my wife and I were seeking opportunities for growth on the professional and personal fronts. The Department of Neurology at YSM seemed to be the right fit for the next phase for me and for my research program, via a diverse, multi-disciplinary, supportive and collaborative research environment at Yale. The fit also seemed right for my wife, Nitya Bakshi, MD, who will be joining the Department of Pediatrics (Division Hematology/Oncology) at YSM and growing her research program on chronic pain in children and adolescents with sickle cell disease.

My family and I are excited to make YSM and the New Haven area our new home. We have two children (Nandini: eight years old, and Siddharth: three years old). I play the guitar, am currently learning how to play the drums, and am an avid Foo Fighters fan."

Yale's Department of Neurology celebrated its 70th year with a celebration at the Quin House in Boston, Massachusetts as part of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) meeting.

Shown from left to right: Orly Avitzur, MD, MBA, president of the AAN, who welcomed the group ; Richard Mattson, MD, professor of neurology who provided a history of the department; David Hafler, MD, current chair; and Stephen Waxman, MD, PhD, former department chair. Drs. Waxman and Hafler gave perspectives on the Department.