Nathan Staff, MD, PhD

Dr. Nathan Staff is a neurologist, Associate Professor, and Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Neurology at Mayo Clinic Rochester who cares for patients with neuromuscular diseases such as peripheral neuropathy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease). After completing his Bachelor of Science at the University of Minnesota, he received his Medical Degree and Ph.D. in neuroscience from Northwestern University. He then was a resident and chief resident at Mayo Clinic Rochester, with subsequent subspecialization training in clinical neurophysiology and peripheral nerve disorders.

Dr. Staff is highly involved in patient care, education, and research at Mayo Clinic. Regarding patient care, he is the Director of the ALS Multidisciplinary Clinic, which provides long-term care for over 100 local patients yearly with ALS. This is in addition to the hundreds of national and international referrals for ALS that yearly come to Mayo. Dr. Staff’s research efforts employ regenerative medicine strategies in both laboratory-based model systems and human clinical trials in order to study disorders that damage the peripheral nervous system. His emphasis has been primarily on ALS and chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy, two diseases with high clinical morbidity. He and his colleagues have led Mayo Clinic’s Clinical Trials studying injection of autologous mesenchymal stem cells into the spinal fluid of patients with ALS. In his NIH-supported laboratory, he utilizes patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology to study mechanisms of neuromuscular diseases in vitro.