Dr. Roger W. Kula

Roger W. Kula, M.D., completed medical school in 1970 at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md. He then came to New York to begin his internal medicine training at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. His neurology training continued at the University of California Hospitals, San Francisco, where his exposure to the influence of then-chairman Robert A. Fishman, M.D., first stimulated his interest in spinal fluid physiology. He completed his formal residency training at the Medical Neurology Branch of the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke, Bethesda, Md., in 1975, where he continued training in neuromuscular diseases under the mentorship of W. King Engel, M.D.

In 1977, he returned to New York to establish a neuromuscular disease program at the SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn as assistant professor of neurology. He was certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine in 1975 and by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1977. He went on to establish one of the most clinically active Muscular Dystrophy Association clinics in the tri-state area and developed a national reputation in the study and treatment of autoimmune neuromuscular diseases, motor neuron diseases and muscular dystrophy. In 1991, he was appointed chairman of neurology at The Long Island College Hospital while continuing to serve as associate professor of clinical neurology and vice chairman of the Department of Neurology at the SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn. He was honored for his dedication to the clinical care of patients by being named the first recipient of the Muscular Dystrophy Association's Ade T. Milhorat Humanitarian Award in 1998. He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who’s Who In Science and Engineering, New York magazine's “Best Doctors in New York” and Castle Connolly’s Best Doctors In America.

After an increasingly close collaboration with Dr. Thomas H. Milhorat through the 1990's, his interests expanded to include the diverse and subtle neurological symptoms plaguing Chiari and syringomyelia patients. In 2003, he joined the Chiari Institute as its Medical Director. Dr. Kula is recognized as a Fellow in the American Academy of Neurology and on the physician panels of The American Syringomyelia Alliance Project, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, the Neuropathy Association, the National Fibromyalgia Association and the Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome Associations. He has been a funded investigator with grants supported by the American Syringomyelia Alliance Project, the Muscular Dystrophy Association and numerous pharmaceutical groups such as Amgen, Regeneron, Ahhott Labs and Burroughs-Wellcome.