Dr. Andrea Harriott is a board-certified neurologist and headache specialist at the John R. Graham Headache Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. She’s published over a dozen scientific papers in top medical journals and presented at the 2017 International Headache Academy. She is a Junior Editor of Cephalalgia and serves on the Education Committee of the American Headache Society. She treats various headache syndromes including migraine, migraine associated stroke and vascular diseases in migraine sufferers.
Archives: Experts
Bert Sperling
As the founder of Best Places to Live, Bert Sperling is one of the foremost experts on geographical differences that impact quality of life. His popular website, BestPlaces.net, offers insights and tools for statisticians and consumers alike. His organization produces geographic data for major news organizations and companies.
Jenni Grover Prokopy
Jenni Grover Prokopy is founder of ChronicBabe.com, where she draws on her experience with fibromyalgia and other chronic conditions to teach women to live well despite illness. Her book on crafting an incredible life beyond illness—ChronicBabe 101—will be published in 2017. For 25 years, Jenni has enjoyed success as a writer, speaker, activist, and consultant to hundreds of organizations worldwide. She focuses on health care, helping others craft and share stories of strength, wellness, and inspiration in the face of adversity. Many women with chronic pain or illness feel they don’t have a voice in the healthcare conversation. In fact, women are far under-represented in conversations about law, finance, and social issues related to health care. Jenni’s work is meant to strengthen women’s voices and help them be heard about the reality of life with chronic illness.
Josh Turknett, MD
Dr. Turknett is the author of The Migraine Miracle, A Sugar Free, Gluten Free Ancestral Diet to Reduce Inflammation and End Your Headaches for Good. He is a practicing neurologist in Atlanta, Georgia, with DeKalb Neurology. He and his wife Jenny also run an online support community for people interested in implementing his 21-day meal plan for people with migraine to change the way they eat.
Michael Steinberg
Michael Steinberg is the pioneer behind the first-ever Migraine weather forecast to explain the science behind various weather conditions and patterns that can trigger attacks for some people. Michael Steinberg is an Expert Senior Meteorologist, Senior Vice President and Emeritus member of the Board of Directors of Accuweather. He’s a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, received numerous awards for weather technology innovation, and holds several patents for the invention of weather indices. He’s been quoted in Science, The New York Times, The Economist and worked with the US Departments of Energy and Transportation, as well as NASA.
Vidyamala Burch
Vidyamala was born and raised in New Zealand and first became interested in meditation in 1985 when receiving hospital treatment for a spinal injury. She intuited that meditation, mindfulness and kindness/compassion could offer a unique means of easing the mental suffering associated with the physical pain she was experiencing, which has turned out to be the case. For the subsequent 30 years she has continued to follow this thread, moving to the UK in 1990 to live at Taraloka, a retreat centre in Shropshire, training further in meditation and preparing for ordination into the Triratna Buddhist Order in 1995. Her spinal condition deteriorated further in the late 1990s and she now uses crutches or a wheelchair for mobility due to partial paraplegia, but her overall quality of life has continued to improve as she has become more and more adept at managing her responses to her physical condition and enriching her life in other ways.
In 1996 she moved to Manchester and in 2001 she started teaching mindfulness-based approaches to others living with physical pain and illness, with funding from the Millennium Commission. In 2004 she founded Breathworks with Sona Fricker and Gary Hennessey, both good friends of hers, who are very experienced meditators and teachers. Breathworks has now spread internationally with trainers in over 25 countries. Vidyamala teaches internationally on both Breathworks and Buddhist courses and retreats. She is an author of three books including Mindfulness for Health (2013) which won first prize in the British Medical Association book awards 2014 in the popular medicine category for books aimed at the general public.
Interviews from Vidyamala Burch
Larry Charleston IV, MD
A neurologist and assistant professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, Dr. Larry Charleston IV is a board-certified headache specialist and a member of the American Headache Society. His research on migraine diagnosis and therapies has been published in medical journals such as Headache, Cephalalgia and Neurology.
Interviews from Larry Charleston IV, MD
Zubair Ahmed, MD
Dr. Zubair Ahmed is a neurologist who specializes in the management of migraine at The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, one of the rising stars in headache medicine. Dr. Ahmed’s research interests lie in elucidating migraine aura pathophysiology and headache quality improvement. He presented the latest research on New Persistent Daily Headache at the 2017 International Headache Academy.
Interviews from Zubair Ahmed, MD
Migraine Care for Busy People: New Online Health Solutions
Unrelenting Daily Headaches and Migraines
Bob Wold
Bob and his wonderful wife of 45 years have raised four children and are the proud grandparents of seven. Bob was diagnosed with cluster headache approximately 38 years ago which eventually led to his founding of Clusterbusters, Inc. in 2002. In addition to his work as founder and president of Clusterbusters, Inc., Bob sits on the board of directors of the the Alliance for Headache Disorder Advocacy and was one of the founding board members of the American Headache and Migraine Association.
Bob’s work and accomplishments include legislative initiatives and organizing events for the patient community and medical professionals in Washington, D.C. Among these successful issues have been the adoption of legislation, increased research funding, testifying before the FDA for additional treatment options and the writing of training manuals for government agencies.
Kerrie Smyres
Kerrie Smyres has lived with migraine and chronic daily headache for more than 25 years. She has always loved writing and needed a creative outlet after the migraines became so debilitating that she quit work, so The Daily Headache was born in June 2005. What began as a way to share her experiences quickly became the best job she ever had. She learned so much about migraine, headache disorders and chronic illness, discovered new coping strategies and treatments, and met incredible people. She found a particular interest in writing about the emotional experience of chronic illness. Kerrie loved it so much that she began writing for Migraine.com in 2011.
After spending six years in Seattle and a year in Boston, Kerrie moved back to her hometown of Phoenix in November 2010. Saying goodbye to Seattle was heartbreaking, but the cloudy and fickle weather in Boston were terrible migraine triggers. In Phoenix she is now reconnecting with dear friends, being close to family, and, having fewer migraine attacks with the more stable weather. Passionate, introspective, empathetic (sometimes overly so), fun-loving, stubborn and brave are the best adjectives to describe Kerrie. Her interests include baking, traveling, practicing yoga, reading, watching baseball and making messes with her craft of the month.
Joanna Kempner, PhD
Joanna Kempner is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University where she writes, researches and speaks about medicine, science, politics, gender and the body. She is the author of Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health, an award winning book that examines the gendered social values embedded in the way we talk about, understand, and make policies for people in pain.
In addition to studying how social relations shape the production of knowledge, she is also on the vanguard of research investigating how the social world shapes what we do not know or what scholars are now calling “agnotology,” aka the study of ignorance or the “flip side” of epistemology. She is a recipient of Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence, one of Rutgers’ highest honors.Her research can be read in a wide-range of academic and popular venues, including Science, Headache, Social Science & Medicine, and Migraine.com.
Todd Schwedt, MD
As a Professor of Neurology the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine in Arizona, Dr. Todd Schwedt has seen thousands of migraine patients and evaluated a large number of scans of our hypersensitive brains. His research using advanced MRI techniques has been widely published. He serves on the Board of Directors of the American Headache Society, is the Vice Chairman of the Headache and Facial Pain section of the American Academy of Neurology, is a member of the International Headache Society Classification Committee, and is an Associate editor of Headache, Cephalalgia and Pain Medicine journals.
