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David A. Hafler (born 1952) is an American neurologist. He is the Edgerly Professor and chairman of the department of Neurology at the Yale School of Medicine.
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Early life and education
Hafler was born in 1952 in New York. He became interested in immunology at a young age and began doing research in the field as a high school student. In 1974 he graduated from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia with a combined Bachelor of Science in chemistry and Master of Science in biochemistry. His master's thesis was on fragments of myelin basic protein.
In 1978, he received his MD degree from the University of Miami School of Medicine in Miami, Florida. He was a medical intern from 1978-1979 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. From 1979 to 1982 he was a resident in neurology at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute in New York City. In 1982, he was a guest investigator in the laboratory of the immunologist Henry G. Kunkel at Rockefeller University.
Career
From 1982 to 1984, he was a fellow in neurology and immunology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. He was one of the first post-doctoral fellows of Howard L. Weiner, and began to work in his lab on multiple sclerosis. In 1984, he joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School in the department of Neurology. He stayed on in Weiner's laboratory, becoming a principle investigator.
In 2000, he was appointed to an endowed professorship and became the Breakstone Professor of Neurology at Harvard.
In 2009, Hafler and his laboratory moved to Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut where he became the Glaser Professor and chairman of the department of Neurology. He was awarded the John Dystel Prize for Multiple Sclerosis Research in 2010 by the American Academy of Neurology and National Multiple Sclerosis Society. It was awarded "for fundamental discoveries related to MS in fields such as immunology and genetics, and for bringing clinical importance to basic science findings."
In 2015, Hafler was appointed to the newly created Edgerly Professorship in Neurology at Yale. This endowed professorship was provided by William S. and Lois Stiles Edgerly who had long supported research in multiple sclerosis.