I am professor and chairman of the Department of Neurology at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine. 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.
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)
Commentaries and Editorials
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)...
Reviews
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...
Molecular targets for antiepileptic drug development (with Brian S. Meldrum), Neurotherapeutics (2007)
This review considers how recent advances in the physiology of ion channels and other potential...
The neurobiology of antiepileptic drugs (with Wolfgang Löscher), Nature Reviews Neurosci (2004)
Antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) provide satisfactory control of seizures for most patients with epilepsy. The drugs...