Top neurologists in Massachusetts

Andrew Cole is director of the MGH Epilepsy Service and chief of the Division of Clinical Neurophysiology and Epilepsy at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he also holds a faculty appointment as professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. His clinical work focuses on complex epilepsy, including patients whose seizures have not responded to medication and who may be candidates for surgical evaluation.

Cole's research career spans the neuroscience of seizures at the molecular level and their clinical implications. His 2017 paper in Nature Medicine, using foramen ovale electrodes in patients with Alzheimer's disease, detected silent hippocampal seizures during sleep in patients with no prior seizure history — activity that conventional EEG would miss entirely ¹. That finding opened a line of investigation into whether occult epileptic activity contributes to memory decline in Alzheimer's, which matters to anyone whose older family member has unexplained cognitive changes alongside dementia.

Anthony Amato is vice-chairman of the Department of Neurology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. His specialty is neuromuscular disease — conditions that affect the nerves supplying muscles and the muscles themselves, including myasthenia gravis, inflammatory myopathies, and hereditary muscle diseases.

He was a principal investigator on the MGTX trial, a large international randomized study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2016 that settled a long-debated question in myasthenia gravis: thymectomy combined with standard drug therapy improved clinical outcomes over three years compared to medication alone ³. If you or a family member has myasthenia gravis and your neurologist has raised the question of thymectomy, the clinical standard they are referencing traces back in part to that trial. Amato also helped develop the EULAR/ACR classification criteria for idiopathic inflammatory myopathies, used internationally to classify conditions like dermatomyositis and polymyositis ⁴.

Elizabeth Thiele is a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and practices at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she has built one of the country's most recognized programs for tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) — a genetic condition that causes benign tumors to grow in the brain and other organs, often causing severe, difficult-to-treat epilepsy in children.

Her research on TSC has informed how the disease is managed across its full range of complications. She contributed to the EXIST-1 trial, a phase 3 randomized study published in The Lancet that showed everolimus — an mTOR inhibitor — shrank subependymal giant cell astrocytomas (SEGAs, a type of brain tumor in TSC) compared to placebo ⁵. SEGAs can obstruct spinal fluid flow and cause life-threatening complications; having a medical option rather than surgery changed how these tumors are managed. Her 2016 Nature Reviews Disease Primers overview of the full TSC disease spectrum is widely used as a clinical and research reference ⁶.

Steven Greenberg holds the John J. Conway Endowed Chair in Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and is a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. He is also vice-chair for faculty development and promotions at MGH. His clinical and research focus is cerebral small vessel disease — the category of conditions that causes most lacunar strokes and a substantial share of vascular dementia, including cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA).

Greenberg is the primary author of the Boston Criteria for CAA, a diagnostic framework validated in a 2001 Neurology paper showing that probable CAA can be diagnosed with high accuracy during life using MRI — without waiting for autopsy confirmation ⁸. Clinically, this matters if you've had a lobar brain hemorrhage and your neurologist is trying to determine whether amyloid-related bleeding is the cause, which affects anticoagulation decisions. His 2013 consensus paper in The Lancet Neurology, which established international neuroimaging standards for small vessel disease research, has been cited more than 5,200 times and shapes how strokes and cognitive decline are studied and classified worldwide ⁷.

Tanuja Chitnis is a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School with appointments at both Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital. She specializes in multiple sclerosis, with a particular interest in pediatric MS, immune mechanisms underlying the disease, and how disability accumulates over a patient's lifetime.

Her 2022 analysis in Brain, using the Novartis-Oxford MS data pool of more than 27,000 patients, found that as MS evolves, progression independent of relapse activity — not relapses themselves — becomes the main driver of disability accumulation ⁹. This distinction matters to patients: it means that controlling relapses, while important early on, does not fully prevent long-term worsening, and that starting effective treatment early offers the best chance of delaying serious disability milestones. Chitnis also contributed to a 2016 Nature Communications study linking gut microbiome changes to relapsing-remitting MS, part of a growing body of evidence on how the immune environment shapes the disease course ¹⁰.

Basil Darras is professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and directs the Neuromuscular Center and Spinal Muscular Atrophy Program at Boston Children's Hospital, where he also serves as associate neurologist-in-chief and chief of the Division of Clinical Neurology. His practice centers on children with neuromuscular diseases, including spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and muscular dystrophies.

Darras played a central role in the clinical trials that led to the first approved treatments for SMA type 1 — the most severe form of a genetic disease that, until recently, was the leading genetic cause of infant death. He was part of the team behind the phase 1 nusinersen study published in Neurology in 2016, which established the safety and early efficacy signals for the antisense oligonucleotide that later became Spinraza ¹². His group also contributed to the FIREFISH trial data for risdiplam, an oral SMA therapy published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2021, which showed increased functional SMN protein expression in infants treated with the drug ¹¹. For families navigating an SMA diagnosis today, the treatment landscape that exists — including gene therapy, antisense therapy, and oral options — was built on trials where Darras and colleagues ran the natural history studies that made trial design possible.