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. His research on student education has focused on effective strategies for teaching in the ambulatory care setting and evaluation 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), cohort studies of prognosis, case-control studies of risk factors, and cross-sectional examinations of quality of care. With collaborators at Yale and other institutions, he was the overall principal investigator for the NIH-funded Insulin Resistance Intervention after Stroke that was completed in 2016. He is currently enrolling participants for a pilot trial of weight loss for patients with a recent ischemic stroke and overweight. New projects include observational research on resident training in primary care and clinical trials of stroke primary and secondary prevention.