David Allen Hafler MD

Summary

• David A. Hafler, M.D. is the Edgerly Professor and Chairman Department of Neurology and Professor of Immunobiology, Yale School of Medicine, and Neurologist-in-Chief of the Yale-New Haven Hospital. He graduated magna cum laude in 1974 from Emory University with combined B.S. and M.Sc. degrees, and the University of Miami School of Medicine in 1978. He completed his internship in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins followed by a neurology residency at Cornell Medical Center-New York Hospital in New York. Dr. Hafler was trained in immunology at the Rockefeller University and then at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Hafler joined the Harvard faculty in 1984 and in 1999 became the Breakstone Professorship of Neurology and was a founding Associated Member of the Broad Institute. As a preeminent physician-scientist, Dr. Hafler has made seminal discoveries defining the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis and autoimmunity. His investigations identified human autoreactive T cells and the mechanisms that underlie their dysregulation including the discovery of human regulatory T cells. He co-led the discovery of genetic variants causing MS and demonstrated how these variants alter immune responses in relationship to environmental factors. Dr. Hafler has over 400 publications in the field of immunology. He is co-founder of the International MS Genetic Consortium and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. He was a Jacob Javits Merit Award Recipient from the NIH he was awarded the Dystel Prize for MS research from the American Academy of Neurology, the University of Miami Annual Distinguished Alumni Award, the Raymond Adams Prize from the American Neurologic Association, and was the 2016 Frontier Lecturer at the AAN. Dr. Hafler is a Member of the Scandinavian Society for Immunology and has been elected to the AOA Society, the the American Society of Clinical Investigation, The Association of American Physicians, and the National Academy of Medicine.