Department of
Medical Education

Ann Marie Murray, MD

 

Board Certification:  Neurology

Medical School: West Virginia University

Residency: West Virginia University 

Faculty Rank: Assistant Professor, Neurology Clerkship Director

Special Clinical/Research Interests:  

Clerkship Director, Movement disorder patients and multiple sclerosis patients 

Is there a particular population of students (e.g., ethnicity, spiritual, sexual orientation) that you would particularly like to advise?

          Anything is fine. 

What does a typical day in the life of a Neurologist include?

  • This is a hard question to answer as neurology offers a wide variety of career schedules. In neurology a provider can work primarily on in-patient medicine, outpatient medicine, intensive care unit, procedures, or a combination of any of the above.  Most neurologist typically achieve some balance between inpatient and outpatient medicine which helps keep the work-life balance really well. 

What is the biggest challenge of being a Neurologist?

  • The biggest challenge in being a neurologist is to stay up to date on the new and exciting research that is occurring. Neurology is one of the fastest growing fields in all of medicine with new discoveries occurring every day.  This is both a wonderful reason to go into neurology, but also requires neurologist to be committed to life long learning. 

How do you foresee Neurology changing over the next 20 years?

  • The treatments within neurology are likely to be the biggest revolution in medicine since the advent of antibiotics. We are already treating many things in neurology with rapidly expanding pharmocologics even relative to the early 2000’s.  The next wave in therapy will likely be genetic therapies and gene replacement treatments.  This will surely be revolutionary in the field.  Additionally diagnostics will continue to expand as tremendous amounts of money are going into this field.  

What advice would you give a student who is considering a Neurology residency?

  • Neurology residency is hard and requires a lot of dedications. All programs require residents to practice in both inpatient and outpatient settings. The training process needs to be challenging in order to expose providers to all the essential aspects to prepare them for their future careers.  Training first begins with establishing a great foundation of internal medicine knowledge, as the PGY1 year is mainly internal medicine rotations.  The remainder of PGY2 to PGY4 years are focused entirely on neurology.