Author: jc3324

Congrats, Jens, on winning the 2018 Hentschel Award for stroke research with therapeutic implication. Safe travels to Jens as he travels back to give a talk and accept the award. Proud of you, buddy!

Earlier this year, Idaira Aguilar, PGY4, was selected to attend the J. Kiffin Penry Epilepsy Program in North Carolina. This program is geared specifically toward Neurology Residents interested in Epilepsy and is an intensive 4 day course in clinical management of epilepsy. Idaira was selected from our program to go, and we are super proud of her!

Our program has seen a number of talented and accomplished poets and writers come through, and our very own Anna DeForest has picked up the torch this year. Anna was amongst a pool of very competitive applicants to attend an intensive two-day writing symposium sponsored by the Department of Medicine. She will be sharing her own writing and learning from her peers under the guidance of Dr. Anna Reisman, an accomplished author whose pieces can be found in the New York Times, Slate, Los Angeles Times, Discover Magazine, NEJM, JAMA, and Heath Affairs; and Lisa Sanders, the Diagnosis columnist for the New York Times Magazine, the author of the New York Times bestseller Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis, and current writer on a series of documentaries for Netflix.

What an incredible opportunity and honor. Congratulations, Anna! Don’t forget the little people when you become a famous writer!

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Our residents are always traveling here and there in search of new, cool knowledge, from large societal conferences like AAN, AES and SFN to smaller conferences like NCS, AHS Annual Headache Conference, and Yale School of Medicine-Hosted Parkinson’s and Movement Disorders Conference.

Tara Kimbrough and Justine Cormier, two of our PGY4’s attended the Neurocritical Care Society conference this September in Boca Raton, Florida. They attended a variety of talks and debates on a variety of topics such as current ethical issues in NCC, multimodal monitoring and critical care EEG, NORSE (new-onset refractory status epilepticus, TBI (traumatic brain injury), and international neurocritical care, to name a few. They also attending interactive workshops on airway and bronchoscopy and creating quality improvement projects in the ICU setting.

Chindhuri Selvadurai, PGY3 also attended a subspecialty conference this September, the Yale School of Medicine-Sponsored conference on Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders. Chindhuri attending many talks and workshops on various movement disorders and their varied treatments from medications to botox to deep brain stimulation. These talks were put on by both local faculty and visiting leaders in the field.,

Vanessa Cooper, PGY3, also recently attended the American Headache Society 60th Annual Conference in Philadelphia. She attended lectures on various headache and pain syndromes and their treatments, including cutting edge new treatments coming down the pipeline. She networked with leaders in the field and participated in an interactive botox and trigger point injection simulation.

Congratulations (AGAIN!) to Jens for being super productive in the last few months. The first is a teaching video in the Neurology, Vestibulo-ocular reflex defect in cerebellar stroke.

The second is a manuscript published in Stroke looking at new diagnosis of afib/aflutter in stroke patients and trying to parse out whether this represents a preexisting risk factor that led to stroke, an arrhythmia triggered by post-stroke autonomic dysfunction, or an incidental finding. Check it out to learn what they found: Incidence of Atrial Fibrillation in Patients With Recent Ischemic Stroke Versus Matched Controls.

Congrats on this impressive accomplishment, Jens!

Our Neurons are so creative, inquisitive, and productive, demonstrated most recently by our very own Chris Traner. Chris wrote an awesome manuscript with Dr. Ben Tolchin, one of our epileptologists, entitled Medical ethics education for Neurology residents: where do we go from here?. The article was accepted for publication in Seminars in Neurology and will be slated for publication in February 2019, so stay tuned! Excellent work and congratulations, Chris!

The department has been incredibly supportive, professionally and financially, of the creation of our very own Women In Neurology (WIN) group at Yale, spearheaded by two of our amazing PGY4’s, Rachel Calix and Bryce Buchowicz. WIN is open to all- residents, APPs, fellows, and attendings- and is intended to provide a forum for networking, mentorship, and discussion of issues pertinent to women in the field of Neurology. The inaugural meeting was held in late August and was a huge success! Thank you so much to Rachel and Bryce for getting this off the ground as well as to program leadership for the incredible support. We look forward to quarterly meetings going forward!

We bow down before the editorial prowess of our very own Dr. Jens Witsch (PGY3), as he was just selected from over 40 applicants to be one of only 5 residents to join the editorial board of Neurology Resident and Fellow Section. This is incredibly impressive and prestigious , and we are so proud of you, Jens! 

Yale Neurology program has a strong tradition of supporting residents who wish to study and practice Neurology abroad during their training. We have had a number of residents spend time learning and working in other counties across the globe including France Uganda, and Prague, to name a few. This year promises to be just as exciting, with residents planning rotations this year in Uganda, Paris, and Thailand. Stay tuned for details (and photos!) from their various trips!

Each year, our program director, Jeremy Moeller, and his family, host the a welcome cookout for all of the Neurology residents and new prelims as a way to get to know the new faces (and have them get to know the us, nutty crew they chose to associate with for the next few years of their training) in a laid back setting.  It’s a great way to kick off the year on a fun, social note, and this year’s was one for the books! Residents from all residency classes, including neurology prelims completing their intern year, program leadership and their families bonded over grilled goodies and fun facts from people’s lives. Apparently, the incoming class is even more impressive than we previously thought, with numerous pianists (classical and jazz), a ukelele player, a professional rower, a gymnast-turned parkour expert, a cartoonist, a painter, and multiple hikers and climbers, to name a few interesting tidbits. It was an excellent afternoon, and we are excited for the upcoming year with our new colleagues!