ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2021

Brian Palmer Hafler, MD, PhD, demonstrated a long-standing interest in neuroscience, starting with his research with Nobel laureate Eric Wieschaus at Princeton. After graduating magna cum laude from Princeton University, he earned his MD/PhD from Harvard Medical School. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow in Dr. Constance Cepko's laboratory at Harvard where he discovered that Olig2 drives retinal progenitor cells towards producing specific cell types, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He completed an ophthalmology residency at Yale and a fellowship in retina at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary as a Heed Fellow where he was awarded the Foundation Fighting Blindness Clinical Research Fellowship Award. Following his fellowship, he received a K08 Clinical Scientist Development Award from the NIH and joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School where he served on Mass. Eye and Ear’s Retina Service and had an appointment at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He recently joined Yale University as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor where he generated the first single-cell human retinal atlas, which was published in Nature Communications. His recent work published in BioRxiv identified shared glial signatures across multiple neurodegenerative conditions affecting the central nervous system. He identified a proangiogenic astrocyte molecular signature that promotes neovascularization in macular degeneration, which may help identify novel therapeutic interventions. Dr. Hafler has received many awards including the Squibb Prize for Scientific Research at Princeton, named as the endowed William Orthwein Yale Scholar, and the Thome Memorial Foundation Award for Age-Related Macular Degeneration Research.