Dr Hafler is the William S. and Lois Stiles Edgerly Professor and
Chairman Department of Neurology and Professor of Immunobiology, Yale School of
Medicine, and is the 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 in biochemistry, 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, where he joined
the faculty in 1984. He became the Breakstone Professor of Neurology at Harvard
and was a founding associate member of the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2009, he
moved to Yale as the Chair of the Department of Neurology. Dr Hafler is a
clinical scientist with a research interest in the mechanism of multiple
sclerosis (MS) with over 370 publications in the field of MS, autoimmunity
and immunology. He is a co-founder of the International MS Genetic Consortium,
a group that identified the genes causing MS.
Dr Hafler has been elected to
membership in the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the Alpha Omega
Society, and was a Weaver Scholar of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society
(NMSS). He is a member of the editorial boards for Journal of Clinical
Investigation and the Journal of Experimental Medicine. He is also co-founder
of the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies and leads the National Institutes of Health Autoimmunity Prevention Center Grant at Yale. Dr Hafler was a Jacob Javits
Merit Award Recipient and has won many awards including the 2010 John Dystel
Prize for MS research from the American Academy of Neurology and NMSS.