#53: Mark Hallett – Putting Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on the map.

Stimulating Brains

Dr. Mark Hallett is arguably the person that put transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on the map. Besides that, he is an authority in the field of movement disorders and motor control, with specific focus – spread throughout the years – on Parkinson's Disease, dystonia and functional movement disorders. In our conversation, Dr. Hallett shares anecdotes from the early time of the TMS field, his large number of mentors and even larger number of mentees, how he was able to treat the pianist Leon Fleisher with botolinum toxin, the enigmatic pathomechanism of dystonia, the mysterious cases of the Havanna syndrome, and his work with functional neurological disorders. We include guest questions by none less than Drs. Mark S. George, Mike D. Fox, Christos Ganos, Robert Chen, Joseph Claßen, Shan Siddiqi and Joseph Taylor.

Dr. Hallett is an NIH Distinguished Investigator and the Chief of the Human Motor Control Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NIH, Bethesda. He trained at Harvard Medical School, NIH, Massachusetts General Hospital and the Institute of Psychiatry in London. He is past President of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology and the President of the newly founded Functional Neurological Disorder Society. Dr. Hallett is also remote past President of the Movement Disorder Society and past Editor-in-Chief of Clinical Neurophysiology. He has won many awards including, in October 2019, the World Federation of Neurology Medal for Contributions to Neuroscience. His work mainly deals with principles of motor control and the pathophysiology of movement disorders. He authored >1,200 scientific papers with more than 160,000 citations and has an H-index of 212. According to research.com, Dr. Hallett is the 75th most cited researcher in the US, and 104th in the world.