Department of Neurological Sciences

My work is poised to challenge a particular dogma of pediatric epilepsy treatment, namely that treating seizures is the only effective way to prevent deleterious cognitive outcomes. The potential findings of this research, therefore, have huge implications for the way physicians treat epilepsy in children. My immediate research project seeks to understand the mechanisms underlying a neuropeptide-based intervention, using cellular, behavioral, and network modeling techniques. This combination of approaches is designed to maximize the translatability of these results to other neurodevelopmental insults that affect cognition in children.

A particular strength of this work is that I will be able to observe neural networks, both at rest and during behavioral tasks, simultaneously in multiple brain regions subserving cognition using high-density neural probes and more conventional tetrode recording techniques. Traditionally, the hippocampus has been the focus of study when looking at the effects of early life seizures on cognition. Since clinical evidence indicates that multiple neural networks are likely affected by generalized early life seizures, particularly executive function networks of the PFC, I can extend this work by examining LFP and single-unit firing in the hippocampus and PFC simultaneously during tasks that require careful crosstalk between these structures. There are currently very few, if any, pharmaceutical treatment options for executive dysfunction in epilepsy.