Directors.
SHENG-HAN KUO, MD
Dr. Kuo is a physician-scientist focusing on research of cerebellar diseases and Parkinson's disease. He has investigated the cerebellar changes in the post-mortem tissues of patients with essential tremor, and is involved in the natural history study and clinical trials of spinocerebellar ataxias. He has published articles in Neurology, Movement Disorders, and the Journal of Neuroscience. Dr. Kuo is a recipient of the American Academy of Neurology Research Fellowship Award and the Parkinson's Disease Foundation Lucien Côté Early Investigator Award in Clinical Genetics.
Ming-Kai Pan
MD, PhD
Dr. Pan's scholarly interest lies in the study of brain circuitry of movements. In particular, he focuses on two important brain regions for movement initiation and coordination: basal ganglia and cerebellum. In particular, his lab has discovered the burst firing of subthalamic nucleus is responsible for the slow movements in the animal models for Parkinson’s disease due to the unique distribution of the glutamatergic receptors in the subthalamic neurons. He also confirmed that human Parkinson’s disease patients also have similar receptor distributions, providing evidence that burst firing of subthalamic nucleus is important physiological signature for Parkinson’s disease.
ELAN D. LOUIS, MD, MS
Elan D. Louis, MD, MS, leads the Movement Disorders Section at Yale Medicine and specializes in disorders of involuntary movement. With a particular interest in essential tremor (ET), one of the most common neurological disorders, he is the founder of the Essential Tremor Centralized Brain Repository, a national centralized brain bank for the study of ET.