Yale Poaches Harvard Prof in Medical School Expansion

Yale's School of Medicine has recruited its second major Harvard faculty member this year as part of an aggressive three-pronged expansion into clinical neuroscience, cancer, and cardiovascular disease research—initiatives sustained despite ongoing financial duress.

David A. Hafler, a world-renowned multiple sclerosis researcher and the director of molecular immunology in the Department of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, will leave Boston in September to chair Yale's Department of Neurology. Hafler said that he was very happy with his position at Harvard, but ultimately the opportunity to organize and run an entire department at Yale prompted him to accept the offer.

"[Yale] is very much still in expansion mode," Hafler said. "In spite of the downturn, Yale is going ahead with number of major recruits and and expanding number of programs." He added that though Harvard is "clearly not in expansion mode right now," the University already benefits from a "credible strength across the board" and what many regard as "the best medical complex on earth."

In April, Thomas J. Lynch, Jr., former chief of hematology and oncology at the Mass. General Cancer Center, left Harvard after 23 years to become director of the Yale Cancer Center and physician-in-chief of the Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Yale had also appointed a new chief of cardiology from Dartmouth last summer.

Robert J. Alpern, dean of the Yale School of Medicine, said in an interview that he was willing to "invest heavily" in building his neurology department despite the school's slumping endowment. He said that Harvard, with a larger endowment but similar financial difficulties, may be focusing on other priorities.

"I want [Hafler] to be able to build a great program, I want him to recruit a lot of faculty, and I want our neurology program to get much bigger than it is now," Alpern said. "I actually want someone with his great taste to come here and recruit a lot of clinical and research faculty, and so we put up a package that would allow him to do both."

Hafler joined the Harvard faculty in 1984 and led a team that identified the genes implicated in causing multiple sclerosis, which he said is likely his "most important and long-lasting" accomplishment. But Alpern said that what makes Hafler exceptional among researchers world-wide are his leadership skills and ability to translate research work to the clinical domain.

"Every department needs leadership if the department is going to go from outstanding to more outstanding," said Stephen Waxman, Yale's current neurology chair, who also praised Hafler's work in organizing international research consortia. "Among people who are really good scientists, very few have the innate ability to build programs and collaborations and cooperative efforts, and he has that ability."

Hafler, who will also become chief of neurology at Yale-New Haven Hospital, said that in building and organizing a new and larger clinical department for Yale, he would likely be hiring many new faculty and researchers—possibly from Harvard. He said that Yale is offering attractive positions for new researchers, and that he certainly hoped he would be able to move his entire lab, which according to its Web site includes two assistant professors, four junior faculty instructors, and almost 10 post-doctoral fellows.

Kevin C. O'Connor, an assistant professor of neurology who has worked with Hafler for over 10 years, said that Hafler has expressed interest in taking his senior staff with him to Yale, but that nothing has been finalized.

Alpern said that while Yale does not specifically target Harvard in searching for new faculty, many top quality medical researchers happen to be in Boston. Most of them, he said, are not interested in leaving Harvard unless Yale is offering an attractive position in an high-priority, visionary program.

Nancy Tarbell, HMS's dean of academic and clinical affairs, said she was not concerned about the recent departures marking a trend, as she viewed Yale's successful recruitment efforts as more of a testimony than a threat to Harvard's ability to train leading researchers. That peer institutions have set their sights on Harvard faculty and offered them leadership positions should be viewed as "a positive," Tarbell said.

"We're really helping to influence the leadership around the country," Tarbell said. "But of course, retaining some of our best and brightest is always something we care about."

Even before Harvard felt the full effects of the financial crisis, the Medical School had been working to revamp faculty development and diversity efforts. These initiatives, Tarbell said, had been identified as one of the many priorities spawning from Medical School Dean Jeffrey S. Flier's strategic planning process launched in Oct. 2007, soon after Flier assumed his post.

But once Harvard found itself in financial straits, the Medical School had to rein in its efforts and focus instead on "things that are not very expensive but improve faculty morale," Tarbell said. Tarbell declined to discuss details, as the initiatives have yet to be officially announced.

Like Harvard's other schools, the Medical School was forced to limit its faculty searches to "very selective ones [that] made sense going forward" in the past year, Tarbell said.

"We followed up a little more slowly given the financial constraints," Tarbell said of faculty development efforts. "We're trying to be realistic and not do things we can't afford to do."

Alpern said that Hafler's decision to leave for Yale would likely not hurt Harvard's neurology program significantly, given its depth of researchers, but noted that the appointment would be a "major improvement" for Yale's department. He also said that Harvard and Yale have traditionally collaborated in research, despite their friendly competition, and that Harvard faculty had helped Yale build its cancer center.

"Harvard is very strong in neurology and has a lot of depth. [Halper's departure] is no doubt a loss, but it's not a catastrophic loss," Alpern said. "We very much want to grow our clinical practice, and Harvard already has a much larger clinical practice in neurology than we do, so this will be an opportunity for us to really expand on that."

—Staff writer June Q. Wu can be reached at junewu@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Peter F. Zhu can be reached at pzhu@fas.harvard.edu.