CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER

Dr. Slater serves as Chief Medical Officer for Stratus, having worked in the field of epilepsy for more than 27 years. He served as Director of the Texas Comprehensive Epilepsy Program from 2004 to 2018, growing the center from a single neurologist and neurosurgeon to one of the largest epilepsy surgery programs in the country. He has served as an investigator for numerous clinical trials of novel anticonvulsants and medical devices. His early research work focused on the potential for applying techniques of the developing field of artificial neural networks to classification problems in clinical neurophysiology. These studies demonstrated the ability of such networks to distinguish disease states with a level of discrimination higher than achieved through statistical or human visual analysis. While the architectures have evolved and now such analyses are commonplace, these were the first such studies of their kind. His more recent research has focused on changes to brain electrical activity related to drowsiness.

DIRECTOR, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA/TAMPA GENERAL HOSPITAL COMPREHENSIVE EPILEPSY PROGRAM

PROFESSOR, NEUROLOGY AT USF

Selim Benbadis, MD, is a board-certified epileptologist and clinical neurophysiologist. Benbadis graduated from medical school at the University of Nice (Nice, France), where he completed a residency in family medicine. He completed his neurology residency at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation where he stayed an additional 2 years to complete a fellowship in epilepsy, EEG, and sleep medicine. Dr. Benbadis is currently a professor of neurology at the University of South Florida and the Director of the University of South Florida /Tampa General Hospital Comprehensive Epilepsy Program. His interests are in the diagnosis and management of seizures that are difficult to control and the misdiagnosis of epilepsy. He has authored more than two hundred articles and book chapters. He also has a strong interest in medical writing and editing and serves on several editorial boards. Finally, he has a strong interest in education, serves as faculty on numerous courses each year, and has received several teaching awards.

MEDICAL DIRECTOR, BIOGEN

TUFTS UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, MD

Dr. Cochrane completed his residency in neurology in the Partners Neurology Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). He then finished a fellowship in neuromuscular medicine and electromyography at BWH. He completed the Fellowship in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, and then served as a faculty fellow at the Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Since 2005, he has worked as an attending neurologist specializing in neuromuscular disease at BWH. He also worked as senior ethics consultant at BWH and served on the Partners IRB. He taught medical ethics to Harvard Medical students, residents, faculty, and nursing staff at all levels, and was the first director of neuroethics at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. In 2018, Dr. Cochrane joined Biogen as the medical director.

Omotola Hope, MD, is a board-certified neurologist who specializes in treating epilepsy and other types of seizures. Hope is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. She completed an internship in internal medicine at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., and her residency in neurology at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. She also completed a fellowship in epilepsy at Yale New Haven Hospital, as well as a research fellowship through the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Yale University School of Medicine. She currently treats patients at Houston Methodist Sugar Land and was previously at Memorial Hermann Hospital, where she also served as an associate professor of neurology and program director of the epilepsy fellowship at McGovern Medicine School at the University of Texas Health Science Center – Houston.

DIRECTOR, MID-ATLANTIC EPILEPSY AND SLEEP CENTER

CLINICAL PROFESSOR, NEUROLOGY, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY, MD

Dr. Klein’s clinical research includes novel treatments of epilepsy, dietary treatments of epilepsy in adults, prevention of epilepsy after traumatic brain injury, the effect of sex and stress hormones on epilepsy, and women with epilepsy.

He has received grants from the National Institutes of Health and the American Epilepsy Society, and investigator-initiated study grants from several pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Klein has published more than 45 peer-reviewed articles and contributed chapters to several books on epilepsy. He has been a member of the American Epilepsy Society Scientific Program Committee, Treatment Committee, and the Health Reform Task Force. Currently, he acts as a reviewer for a number of neurological, epilepsy and endocrinological journals and is chair of the AES Corporate Advisory Council. He is the Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the North American Consortium of Private Epilepsy Practices.

PROFESSOR, NEUROLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN FRANCISCO

MEDICAL DIRECTOR, UCSF SEIZURE DISORDERS SURGERY PROGRAM

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE NEW ORLEANS, MD

Dr. Knowlton’s research focuses on discovering advances in clinical neurophysiology and brain imaging that can affect decision-making in treatment of seizure disorders and brain tumors. The main focus of his work is to determine which advanced imaging discoveries should be moved to clinical application. He has worked specifically to improve and validate the clinical utilization of multiple modalities of brain imaging, including high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), MR spectroscopy/spectroscopic imaging (MRS/MRSI), positron emission tomography (PET), magnetic and electrical source imaging (MSI/ESI), and ictal single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). From the very beginning of his career, Dr. Knowlton has taken advantage of combining multiple imaging modalities to allow comparison of the relative merits for each test to determine if novel information can be discerned and measure whether purported advances improve patient care.

PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT CHAIR OF PSYCHOLOGY, COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY

COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY, PH.D.

Since 2013, Dr. Rojas has served as a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Colorado State University. The primary theme of his work has been the identification of heritable biomarkers in autism, using non-invasive neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques in first-degree relatives. His specialties include magnetoencephalography, electroencephalography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, autism, and schizophrenia.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE, DIVISION OF CARDIOVASCULAR MEDICINE, DEPARTMENT OF MEDICINE, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, BETH ISRAEL DEACONESS MEDICAL CENTER

DIRECTOR OF CARDIOLOGY GRAND ROUNDS, BETH ISRAEL DEACONESS MEDICAL CENTER

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, PH.D.

Dr. Verrier has investigated sudden cardiac death for more than three decades, having published over 300 original articles. He is inventor of 12 licensed patents for diagnosis and treatment of heart rhythm abnormalities and prediction of sudden cardiac death. During the past six years, he has focused attention on the cardiac effects of epilepsy in close collaboration with Professor Steven Schachter, a pioneer in VNS therapy and past president of AES. Their joint publications in Epilepsia and Epilepsy & Behavior have broken new ground in the study of patients with epilepsy.