Steven Kittner, MD, MPH
Professor, Department of Neurology, University of Maryland School of Medicine
Steven Kittner is an internationally recognized expert in stroke and cerebrovascular disease who has helped thousands of patients clinically and by leading regional and international collaborations to understand the causes of stroke.
Dr. Kittner joined the School of Medicine faculty in 1988. His work as a Maryland Stroke Center member examined traditional and emerging stroke risk factors, including genetic risk factors, and the contribution of these risk factors to the excess burden of stroke in African Americans.
He developed a working group of regional neurologists interested in stroke in the young, the Young Stroke Study Group, that supported his groundbreaking Baltimore-Washington Cooperative Young Stroke Study. Kittner obtained Institutional Review Board approval and waivers from all 46 Baltimore-Washington regional acute and rehab hospitals. This population-based dataset on all strokes in patients younger than age 45 allowed for the first accurate estimation of the risk of stroke during pregnancy and highlighted the tremendous increased risk of stroke in the postpartum period.
Continuing with this regional collaboration, Kittner went on to develop regional case control studies of stroke in young adults that included collection of DNA for studies of genetic risk factors for stroke. Subsequently, he recognized that the field of stroke genetics would not make progress without international collaboration, and, in 2007, he was one of the 16 founding members of the International Stroke Genetics Consortium. He led the first National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded genome-wide study of stroke, the Stroke Genetics Network from 2009 to 2016, and the international Genetics of Early-Onset Ischemic Stroke Consortium from 2018 to 2022.
He has received continuous grant support over the last three decades from the NIH, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Heart Association (AHA).
Kittner has co-authored more than 175 peer-reviewed manuscripts, chapters, and reviews, and he has been published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and Annals of Neurology. In 2007, he received AHA’s David Gibbons Memorial Research Award.
Kittner earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, his Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, and his undergraduate degree from Brown University.
