Drs. Galetta, Balcer to join NYU Langone

New York-Steven L. Galetta, MD, has been appointed the Philip K. Moskowitz, MD, Professor and Chair of the department of neurology, and Laura Balcer, MD, MSCE, has been appointed vice chairwoman of the neurology department at the New York University (NYU) Langone Medical Center. The appointments are effective Nov. 1.

Dr. Galetta will join NYU Langone from the University of Pennsylvania (UP), where he is the Ruth Wagner Van Meter and J. Ray Van Meter Professor of Neurology, vice chairman of the department, and director of the division of neuro-ophthalmology. He also leads the neuro-ophthalmology fellowship program.

Dr. Galetta has received nearly 50 awards, including the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award, UP’s highest teaching award. He was the recipient of the Louis Duhring Outstanding Clinical Specialist Award at UP in 1998. Dr. Galetta’s areas of expertise include research and advances in the treatment of double vision, neuro-ophthalmology, and optic nerve disorders. He has written more than 200 original papers and serves on the editorial boards of Neurology and the Journal of Neuro-Ophthalmology.

Dr. Balcer, who was a neuro-ophthalmology fellow under Dr. Galetta, was one of the first epidemiologists within the field of neuro-ophthalmology. She is an established clinical investigator whose research has focused on the development of visual outcome measures for multiple sclerosis (MS). Dr. Balcer’s studies, through collaborative efforts with investigators from several other institutions, first identified structure-function correlations in the visual pathway that now allow the measuring of axonal and neuronal loss in patients with MS and optic neuritis.

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