Basil Darras | Medical Services
Programs & Services
Languages
- English
- Greek
Basil Darras | Education
Medical School
University of Athens Medical School
1977, Athens, Greece
Internship
University of Athens Hospital
1979, Athens, Greece
Residency
Nassau County Medical Center, Clinical Campus SUNY at Stony Brook
1982, Stony Brook, NY
Fellowship
Tufts Medical School, New England Medical Center
1985, Boston, MA
Fellowship
Yale University School of Medicine
1988, New Haven, CT
Basil Darras | Certifications
- American Board of Medical Genetics and Genomics (Clinical Genetics)
- American Board of Pediatrics (General)
- American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (Child and Adolescent Neurology)
Basil Darras | Professional History
Dr. Darras serves as an expert for the Department of Neurology for Boston Children's Hospital Precision Medicine Service. For more information about the Precision Medicine Service please visit bostonchildrens.org/precisionmed.
I focus in my practice on treating children with neuromuscular diseases, which present as problems of motor development and function.
I am Associate neurologist-in-Chief at Boston Children's Hospital and hold the Joseph J. Volpe Chair in Neurology at Harvard Medical School. I am the Chief of the division of clinical neurology in the Department of Neurology at the hospital. For 11 years, I ran the hospital's neurology residency training program and I was twice voted teacher of the year by neurology residents.
My special focus is in the care of children with neuromuscular conditions originating from inherited or acquired conditions of the motor unit. These include patients with complex muscle diseases like muscular dystrophies and congenital or metabolic myopathies, neuromuscular transmission defects, neuropathies, motor neuronopathies, and also inflammatory muscle or nerve conditions. Further, I see patients with general neurological problems such seizures when I attend on the inpatient neurology services.
Following medical school in Greece and residencies in pediatrics and child neurology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Tufts Medical Center, respectively. I completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale in genetics, which gives me a unique lens through which I approach problems of childhood motor development.
When I was training in neurology, I gravitated toward neuromuscular cases. The fact that many have a genetic basis appealed to me. I felt that there was a higher probability of finding a treatment if we could understand the pathogenesis of the diseases.
At Boston Children's Hospital, I am proud to be involved with two innovative multi-disciplinary clinical programs. I direct the Neuromuscular Program, which provides diagnostic evaluation and therapeutic services for children with neuromuscular diseases and is one largest of its kind in the country; and the Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) Clinical Research Program, which seeks to improve medical care of children with SMA and discover new treatments for this devastating motor neuron disease.
Through my clinical and research experience, as well as my hospital leadership roles, I have influenced care in the field of pediatric neuromuscular diseases both nationally and internationally.