Darren R. Gitelman, MD
Associate Professor of Neurology and Physiology

710 N. Lake Shore Dr.
Abbott 11th Floor
Chicago, IL 60611
(312) 908-8614

Research Profile

Dr. Gitelman was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He obtained his MD from Washington University in St. Louis, as part of the 8 year Scholars Program in Medicine combined B.A. – M.D. degree. He completed a medical internship and residency at the Columbia – Presbyterian Medical Center. This was followed by a 1 year fellowship in brain imaging at the New York State Psychiatric Institute with Dr. Isak Prohovnik. He did his Neurology Residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA where he was also chief resident. A subsequent two-year Behavioral Neurology fellowship took place at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston under Dr. Marsel Mesulam. Dr. Gitelman is board certified in Internal Medicine, Neurology and Behavioral Neurology.

In 1994, Dr. Gitelman joined the faculty of Northwestern University where he is now an Associate Professor of Neurology and Radiology. Dr. Gitelman’s clinic is part of the Neurobehavior and Memory Health Services clinic in the Department of Neurology. He cares for patients with a variety of cognitive disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, Frontal dementia, Progressive Aphasia/Semantic dementia, Corticobasal degeneration, Lewy Body dementia, Prion diseases, vascular dementia, mild cognitive impairment and others.

Dr. Gitelman’s laboratory is focused on understanding the impact and mechanisms of various disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Progressive aphasia, Parkinson’s disease and cancer on cognition and behavior. He uses functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging to examine changes in brain networks brought about by disease and development.

• Gitelman, D. R. (2003). Attention and its disorders. British Medical Bulletin 65, 21-34.
• Gitelman, D. R., Penny, W. D., Ashburner, J., and Friston, K. J. (2003). Modeling regional and psychophysiologic interactions in fMRI: The importance of hemodynamic deconvolution. NeuroImage 19, 200-207.
• Sonty, S. P., Mesulam, M. M., Thompson, C. K., Johnson, N. A., Weintraub, S., Parrish, T. B., and Gitelman, D. R. (2003). Primary progressive aphasia: PPA and the language network. Annals of Neurology 53, 35-49.
• Apkarian, A. V., Sosa, Y., Sonty, S., Levy, R. M., Harden, R. N., Parrish, T. B., and Gitelman, D. R. (2004). Chronic back pain is associated with decreased prefrontal and thalamic gray matter density. Journal of Neuroscience 24, 10410-10415.
• Small, D. M., Voss, J., Mak, Y. E., Simmons, K. B., Parrish, T., and Gitelman, D. (2004). Experience-dependent neural integration of taste and smell in the human brain. Journal of Neurophys. 92, 1892-1903.
• Gitelman, D. R., Nobre, A. C., Sonty, S., Parrish, T. B., and Mesulam, M. M. (2005). Language network specializations: An analysis with parallel task designs and functional magnetic resonance imaging. NeuroImage 26, 975-985.
• Mesulam, M., Weintraub, S., Parrish, T., and Gitelman, D. (2005). Primary progressive aphasia: Reversed asymmetry of atrophy and right hemisphere language dominance. Neurology 64, 556-557.
• Sonty SP, Mesulam MM, Weintraub S, Johnson NA, Parrish TB, Gitelman DR. (2007): Altered effective connectivity within the language network in primary progressive aphasia. Journal of Neuroscience 27(6):1334-1345.