Tanuja Chitnis, MD, MA, FAAN

Dr. Chitnis is the Cindy Larsen Chugg Distinguished Chair in Neurology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. She is also the founding Director of the Mass General Brigham Pediatric Multiple Sclerosis Center at the Massachusetts General Hospital. She has cared for adults and children with multiple sclerosis and neuroimmunological disorders for over 20 years. Additionally, she serves as the co-Director of the Brigham Multiple Sclerosis Center and is the Director of the Comprehensive Longitudinal Investigation of MS at the Brigham (CLIMB) study and biorepository which has yielded over 150 publications explicating MS pathogenesis and prognostic models. To meet the need to identify new biomarkers and therapeutic targets for MS and related diseases, she created the Translational Neuroimmunology Research Center (TNRC) at the Ann Romney Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital which encompasses a neuroimmunology laboratory group, clinical research and database team and bioinformatics-analytics group, with the goal of identifying new biomarkers, algorithms, and therapeutic targets with the goal of bench to bedside translation for neuroimmunological diseases. Dr. Chitnis has led several clinical trials in MS including recent phase III trials in pediatric MS published in the New England Journal of Medicine as well as phase I-IV trials in adult multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease. She has published over 250 peer reviewed articles in the MS and neuroimmunological diseases field, and she has received funding awards from the Department of Defense, National MS Society, NIH, and other foundations to support her work.