Walter Kernan, MD

Walter N. Kernan is professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. Born in Milton, Massachusetts and educated at Harvard College and Dartmouth Medical School, he completed his internship and residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. After fellowship training in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Yale, he joined the Yale faculty in the Section of General Internal Medicine.

In addition to practicing general internal medicine, Dr. Kernan's work has included educational administration, and clinical research on topics at the interface between internal medicine and cerebrovascular disease. Dr. Kernan founded and directed the Ambulatory Component of the Internal Medicine Clerkship during 1993-2015. In 2015, this clerkship merged with the psychiatry clerkship to become the Integrated Clerkship for Primary Care and Psychiatry. The new clerskhip, which Dr. Kernan co-directs, includes a network of more than 140 community-based and hospital -based internists and family physicians who volunteer to teach students according to a common instructional protocol. His research on student education has focused on effective strategies for teaching in the ambulatory care setting and evaluatioin of teaching quality. In the area of cerebrovascular disease, Dr. Kernan's research has included clinical trials of new therapies for prevention of recurrent stroke (estrogen, thiazolidinediones), chort studies of prognosis, case-control studies of risk factors, and cross-sectional examinations of quality of care. He is currently the principal investigator for a multi-institutional trial funded by the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to test the effectiveness of PPAR gamma agonist therapy, compared with placebo, for prevention of recurrent stroke and myocardial infarctoin among non-diabetic persons with a recent ischemic stroke or transient ischemic attack and insulin resistance.