A Welcome from the Chair

Steve Goldman, MD, PhDWelcome to the Department of Neurology of the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry. Rochester’s neurology department has a long tradition as one of the premier neurology training programs in the United States. First established by Dr. Robert J. Joynt in 1966 - 1986 and then expanded between 1987 - 2007 by Dr. Robert C. Griggs.  The Department now has over 130 faculty.  This includes 90 full-time academic faculty, 21 faculty in other departments with secondary appointments in neurology, and 11 faculty at other institutions with adjunct appointments in neurology.   In 2009, extramural research support totaled $31 million, and the department has consistently ranked within the top 6 nationally in NIH research funding. Yet rather than rest on its laurels, the department is again aggressively expanding further, with a total of 22 new faculty recruits anticipated over the next 5 years, as part of the University of Rochester’s strategic plan for 2009-13.

By way of introducing the department’s structure and competencies, and both its basic and clinical program highlights, please consider the following:

Our scope and structure

Neurology is composed of the following major divisions, each led by nationally and internationally prominent senior investigators. Virtually all of these specialty units enjoy national as well as regional referral bases.

Our clinical program and regional draw

Residents are based primarily at the University of Rochester’s principal teaching site, Strong Memorial Hospital. At Strong, the specialty units share a 24 bed inpatient unit for neurology, which is adjacent to a 24 bed neurosurgery inpatient unit with incorporated neurological critical care postoperative and step-down beds. In addition, the department has just moved into a new 5000 sq ft outpatient facility, which has examining rooms adjacent to both clinical neurophysiology and neuroradiology facilities. The neurology outpatient clinic at Strong saw over 23,000 patients in 2008-9, distributed among both general neurology and a host of specialty clinics. Additional outpatient facilities are dedicated to clinical trials, and are housed within the nearby clinical trial coordination center, which is awaiting a move in 2010 to a new building dedicated to clinical and translation research, including clinical trials.

In addition to their work at Strong, residents also rotate at Highland Hospital and the Canandaigua Veterans Administration Hospital. Highland in particular is enjoying rapid growth of its neurological and neurosurgical services, with a planned expansion in 2010 of a dedicated 20-bed inpatient neuromedicine floor. In addition, Highland sees over 4,000 neurological outpatients yearly, covering a general population complementary to the tertiary care referrals that comprise so much of Strong’s population.

Besides Strong, Highland and the VA, additional resident rotations through Rochester General Hospital, with its 11 bed neurology unit and 13 bed stroke rehab unit, are planned beginning 2010. Strong, RGH and Highland together comprise the three largest hospitals in the city of Rochester, and have a combined market share that includes most of Rochester’s population, as well as that of the surrounding counties.  The expansion of the residency program to include RGH, together with the rapid expansion of the Highland Hospital program, will effectively expand neurology’s purview to include the entire city of Rochester, and most of the population of its surrounding counties.

Our research and academic affiliates

Our basic research programs concentrate on the cellular and molecular underpinnings of neurological disease. They include both MD and PhD basic research faculty within the department, as well as a number of affiliate and collaborating laboratories and centers within the medical center. The department’s own laboratories are housed in 23,000 sq ft area of modern laboratory space, most newly constructed, with 6200 sq ft of central office and data analysis space. Indeed, over just the past 7 years, almost 20,000 sq ft of new space for labs in neurology and neurosurgery have opened and are already occupied, catapulting Rochester into the ranks of the country’s premier facilities for the study of neural stem cell biology, glial biology, and translational neuromedicine.

The department has close associations with our colleagues in the Department of Neurosurgery, and in the Divisions of Neuropathology and Neuroradiology. In addition, the department has close interactions with affiliated laboratories and research centers in both the medical center and adjacent university campus that include:

Our future

The department is in the midst of an exciting and aggressive expansion, with a university-wide consolidation of basic and clinical neuroscience disciplines, for the shared purpose of achieving an integrated, translationally-oriented program in neuromedicine. Our goal within neurology is to establish a fully vertically integrated department, in which advances in basic cellular and molecular neurobiology are rapidly advanced to preclinical assessment, and then translated bench to bedside with clinical trials that may be designed and executed internally. The department is already a premier center for training in clinical neurology, as well as in both basic and translational neurobiology and experimental therapeutics; we now hope to combine and leverage these strengths, so as to speed our progress towards developing fundamentally new treatments for neurological disease, while making Rochester a national center for these efforts. I invite you to become more familiar with our department, and to participate in these efforts.

Steve Goldman, MD, PhD
Chairman, Department of Neurology
University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry
Neurologist-in-Chief, Strong Memorial Hospital
Edward and Alma Vollertsen Rykenboer Professor of Neurophysiology
Dean Zutes Chair and Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery