Find a Neurologist in Illinois

Dr. Hrayr Attarian is a sleep neurologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and a professor in the Ken and Ruth Davee Department of Neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He sees patients with insomnia, circadian rhythm disorders, and sleep problems that overlap with other neurologic conditions such as multiple sclerosis.

If you have been struggling with chronic insomnia — trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or both — his 2016 BMJ review lays out how the treatment landscape has shifted toward behavioral therapy first, with medication used more selectively ¹. He was also an early voice connecting fatigue in MS patients to disrupted sleep, and a 2004 study in Archives of Neurology he co-authored found a strong correlation between the two, which changed how MS fatigue gets evaluated in clinic ². His teaching chapter in CONTINUUM on circadian rhythm abnormalities is widely used to orient trainees and general neurologists on jet lag, shift-work disorder, and delayed sleep-phase syndrome ³.

Dr. Bruce Cohen is a professor and neurologist practicing in the Chicago area. His clinical and research focus is neuro-infectious disease, particularly the neurologic complications of HIV.

He was part of the research group that tracked how HIV-associated dementia, neuropathy, and opportunistic infections of the brain changed after combination antiretroviral therapy became widely used in the late 1990s. A 2001 report in Neurology documented the falling incidence of several HIV-related neurologic diseases after effective treatment became available ⁴, and a 2002 study in the Journal of NeuroVirology showed that cognitive impairment patterns also shifted in that period ⁵. Earlier work on progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, helped establish that cytarabine did not improve outcomes, sparing patients from an ineffective chemotherapy ⁶. He also contributed to foundational work linking viral load and CD4 counts to risk of HIV-associated dementia and sensory neuropathy ⁷.

Dr. Stephan Schuele is Chief of Epilepsy and Clinical Neurophysiology at Northwestern Medicine and a professor of neurology at Feinberg School of Medicine. His clinical focus is adult epilepsy that has not responded to first- or second-line medication, plus a smaller practice in focal dystonia.

His 2008 Lancet Neurology review on intractable epilepsy is a standard reference for patients and clinicians thinking about what comes next when standard drugs fail, including surgery, neurostimulation devices, and the ketogenic diet ⁸. On the movement disorder side, he led a study in Neurology of botulinum toxin injections in musicians with focal dystonia — a task-specific movement disorder where the hand or embouchure stops cooperating during performance — and found that more than two-thirds of patients reported improvement ⁹. A follow-up in Movement Disorders compared multiple treatment strategies and gave musicians a clearer picture of what combinations work over the long term ¹⁰. He has also contributed to brain-computer interface research decoding speech directly from motor cortex recordings ¹¹.

Dr. Daniel Wynn directs clinical research at the Consultants in Neurology MS Center in Northbrook and practices in affiliation with Endeavor Health and Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital. He has spent decades treating multiple sclerosis patients and running the trials that test new therapies.

He was first author on the CHOICE trial in The Lancet Neurology, a phase 2 study of daclizumab added to interferon beta that helped set the direction for later anti-CD25 therapies in MS ¹². He also contributed to the PreCISe trial in The Lancet, which showed that starting glatiramer acetate after a first demyelinating event delayed conversion to clinically definite MS — a finding that reshaped early treatment decisions ¹³. His earlier population study of MS in Olmsted County, Minnesota, published in Neurology, remains one of the most cited epidemiology papers in the field ¹⁴. He also contributed to the pivotal trial of dextromethorphan/quinidine for pseudobulbar affect, the uncontrolled laughing or crying that affects some MS and ALS patients ¹⁵.

Dr. Phyllis Zee directs the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern and serves as Chief of Sleep Medicine in the Department of Neurology. She is the Benjamin and Virginia T. Boshes Professor of Neurology at Feinberg School of Medicine.

Her research is among the most cited in the sleep and circadian field. A 2012 position paper in SLEEP laid out why chronic sleep deficiency should be treated as a driver of cardiovascular and metabolic disease, not just a quality-of-life issue ¹⁶, and her work in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis documented how sleep apnea and other sleep disturbances are underdiagnosed in racial and ethnic minority populations ¹⁷. Her 2011 paper in Obesity showed that people who go to bed late eat more calories at dinner and after 8 p.m., independent of how long they sleep, which changed how clinicians think about weight and sleep together ¹⁸. She also co-authored a 2022 international consensus in PLoS Biology on indoor light exposure timing to support sleep, alertness, and mood ¹⁹. A 2010 trial she contributed to showed that aerobic exercise improves sleep and quality of life in older adults with insomnia ²⁰.

Dr. Anthony Reder is a neurologist at The University of Chicago Medical Center, where he treats patients with multiple sclerosis and other neuroimmunologic conditions.

He was senior author on one of the foundational papers measuring inflammatory cytokines in the cerebrospinal fluid of MS patients, published in the Journal of Neuroimmunology, which helped establish the inflammatory basis of MS attacks ²¹. He contributed to the validation of the Functional Assessment of Multiple Sclerosis quality-of-life questionnaire, a standard instrument clinicians use to track how patients are doing between visits ²². His comprehensive review of vitamin D in multiple sclerosis walked through what the evidence actually supports around supplementation ²³, and his work on Neuro-QOL provided patient-reported outcome tools now used across neurologic research and care ²⁴. He has also studied how disease-modifying therapies affect brain volume changes in MS, an imaging marker tied to long-term disability ²⁵.