Strittmatter Is Appointed Chair of Neuroscience at Yale

Stephen Strittmatter, MD, PhD, will assume the position of chair of the Department of Neuroscience and director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine, effective March 1, 2022. Strittmatter, Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology and professor of neuroscience, joined the faculty in 1993 and has served as interim chair since September 2021.

Strittmatter received his MD and his PhD in pharmacology from Johns Hopkins University. He completed his residency in adult neurology and a research fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. He came to Yale after serving as an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.

He is director of the Program in Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair (CNNR) at Yale School of Medicine, which he co-founded with Pietro De Camilli, MD, in 2005, and director of the Yale Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and the Memory Disorders Clinic. His research on axonal growth during development and regeneration has been recognized by the Ameritec Foundation, the John Merck Fund, the Donaghue Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Jacob Javits Award, the American Academy of Neurology, and the King Faisal Prize for Medicine. His discoveries have led to clinical trials of new therapeutic approaches to central nervous system regeneration and to Alzheimer’s disease.

As chair of the Department of Neuroscience, Strittmatter will, as he has as interim chair, advocate for and recruit outstanding faculty—in particular junior faculty—and develop plans for an Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell (iPSC) NeuroCore to accelerate testing of cellular hypotheses related to human neuron function.