Dhasakumar Navaratnam, MD, PhD

Dhsakumar Navaratnam, MD, PhD, is a neurologist at Yale Medicine with a specialty in balance disorders and stroke.

Dr. Navaratnam pays close attention to each patient he meets. “There’s a lot you can tell just by the way someone walks,” he says. “It gives you a ton of information, just watching and seeing them come towards you, whether they’re holding onto a significant other for support, if they’re favoring one leg or another, or if they’re picking up their feet higher than normal.”

Once the patient has arrived in his office, Dr. Navaratnam uses that information in combination with the patient’s medical data to start a discussion about the patient’s medical history and his or her goals for the visit.

His hope is that his patients feel cared for. “Fundamentally, I want them to feel that when they come here, they’ve found somebody who wants to do what’s best for them,” he says.

In addition to seeing patients, Dr. Navaratnam works closely with the Yale Medicine Stroke Center to run clinical trials on the diagnosis and treatment of stroke using a new methodology called single-cell RNA sequencing. He also conducts research to better understand the cause of migraines.