Brian Hafler

Yale School of Medicine
the Broad Institute of Harvard
MIT
New Haven, CT / Boston, MA | USA

Brian Hafler is the William R. Orthwein Yale Scholar, an Associate Professor in the Departments of Ophthalmology and Pathology at Yale University, and Director of the Inherited Retinal Disorders Service. He graduated from Princeton University, where he received the Princeton Senior Thesis Prize for Scientific Research, and earned his MD/PhD from Harvard Medical School with a doctorate in neuroscience.

He completed his Ophthalmology residency at Yale, where he was a Heed Ophthalmic Foundation Fellow, followed by a fellowship in Retinal Degeneration at Harvard. He then served as an Attending Physician at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and a Clinical Associate at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 2017, he joined the Harvard faculty with a K08 award from the National Eye Institute and was recruited back to Yale in 2019 to establish his independent laboratory.

His research focuses on neurodegeneration and retinal repair in macular degeneration and glaucoma, using single-cell analysis. He has received numerous honors, including the Thome Memorial Foundation Award for AMD Research, the Reynold Spector Award in Neuroscience, a Doris Duke Clinical Scientist Development Award, the Cushing Foundation Award for Excellence and Creativity in Scientific Research, an NIH R01 grant, and the American Society for Clinical Investigation Young Physician Scientist Award.