I am professor and chairman of the Department of Neurology at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine. I am also a member of the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience and the Pharmacology and Toxicology Graduate Group. I received a B.A. (biophysics) from Amherst College, and M.D. and Ph.D. (pharmacology) degrees from Yale University. I was a resident, fellow and assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. For over 20 years, I was a senior investigator and chief of the Epilepsy Research Section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. My research interests involve ion channel pharmacology and neurological therapeutics, including antiepileptic drugs and other epilepsy treatment approaches.
Book Chapters
What Clinical Observations on the Epidemiology of Antiepileptic Drug Intractability Tell Us About the Mechanisms of Pharmacoresistance, Puzzling Cases of Epilepsy. Second Edition (2008)
In the past several years, there have been important advances in the clinical epidemiology of...
Antiepileptic Drugs and Migraine, Innovative Drug Development for Headache Disorders (2008)
Prepared for the 16th International Headache Research Seminar, “Innovative Drug Development For Headache Disorders,” March...
Neurosteroids: Endogenous Modulators of Seizure Susceptibility (with Doodipala S. Reddy), Epilepsy: Scientific Foundations of Clinical Practice (2004)
Book Reviews
The Art and Politics of Science (book review), Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (2009)
In this autobiography and collection of essays, we learn how Harold Varmus created a life...
Commentaries and Editorials
Nontraditional Epilepsy Treatment Approaches (with Gregory L. Holmes), Neurotherapeutics (2009)
Overview of articles published in a special issue of Neurotherapeutics (April 2009) on nontraditional (non-drug)...
Brivaracetam: a rational drug discovery success story, Brit J Pharmacol (2008)
Levetiracetam, the alpha-ethyl analogue of the nootropic piracetam, is a widely used antiepileptic drug (AED)...
Original Research
Treatment of Early and Late Kainic-acid Induced Status Epilepticus with the Non-competitive AMPA Receptor Antagonist GYKI 52466 (with Brita Fritsch, Jeffrey J. Stott, and J. Joelle Donofrio), Epilepsia (2010)
Purpose: Benzodiazepines such as diazepam may fail to effectively treat status epilepticus because benzodiazepine-sensitive GABA-A...
Pathological alterations in GABAergic interneurons and reduced tonic inhibition in the basolateral amygdala during epileptogenesis (with Brita Fritsch, Felicia Qashu, T. H. Figueiredo, Vicki Aroniadou-Anderjaska, and Maria F.M. Braga), Neuroscience (2009)
An acute brain insult such as traumatic head/brain injury, stroke, or an episode of status...
Topiramate Reduces Excitability in the Basolateral Amygdala by Selectively Inhibiting GluK1 (GluR5) Kainate Receptors on Interneurons and Positively Modulating GABA-A Receptors on Principal Neurons (with Maria F.M. Braga, Vassiliki Aroniadou-Anderjaska, and He Li), The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (2009)
Topiramate [2,3:4,5-bis-O-(1-methylethylidene)-beta-D-fructopyranose sulfamate] is a structurally novel antiepileptic drug that has broad efficacy in epilepsy,...
Reviews
Convection-Enhanced Delivery in the Treatment of Epilepsy, Neurotherapeutics (2009)
Convection-enhanced delivery (CED) is a novel drug-delivery technique that uses positive hydrostatic pressure to deliver...
Neurosteroid Replacement Therapy for Catamenial Epilepsy (with Doodipala S. Reddy), Neurotherapeutics (2009)
Perimenstural catamenial epilepsy, the cyclical occurrence of seizure exacerbations near the time of menstruation, affects...
Intrinsic Severity as a Determinant of Antiepileptic Drug Refractoriness (with Michael R. Johnson), Epilepsy Currents (2008)
For the most part, resistance to medications in epilepsy is independent of the choice of...
Common pathophysiologic mechanisms in migraine and epilepsy, Archives Neurol (2008)
Migraine and epilepsy are comorbid episodic disorders that have common pathophysiologic mechanisms. Migraine attacks, like...
New molecular targets for antiepileptic drugs: alpha2delta, SV2A, and Kv7/KCNQ/M potassium channels (with Carl W. Bazil), Curr Neurol Neurosci Rep (2008)
Many currently prescribed antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) act via voltage-gated sodium channels, through effects on gamma-aminobutyric...