Curriculum

With instructive didactics — like lectures and journal club — and comprehensive rotations at advantageous training sites, you can expect our curriculum to coverall the key areas of epilepsy, including:

We’ll train you to identify potential neuropsychiatric symptoms such as memory loss, psychosis and depression. We’ll rely on you to obtain an organized history that’s relevant to your patients’ acuity and clinical setting (i.e., the clinic or emergency room) and that identifies any unusual causes of seizures and epilepsy.

You’ll also strengthen your skills in performing mental status examinations relevant to potential neuropsychiatric comorbidities and in examining patients for uncommon side effects of antiepileptic treatment.

By the time you finish our program, you will have sophisticated and detailed knowledge of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology relevant to localization of the epileptic focus. Our faculty members will help you feel fully prepared to interpret results of routine diagnostic studies such as electroencephalography (EEG), video EEG and magnetic resonance imaging to further localize the epileptic focus.

From the start of our program, you can expect to expand your knowledge of various types of surgical interventions and learn to identify diagnostic modalities essential for surgical planning. As you progress through training, you’ll plan and manage phase 1 and 2 surgical evaluation. 

You’ll identify candidates for the use of medical devices approved for epilepsy treatment, and we’ll help you gain knowledge of managing and programing these devices.

Our curriculum ensures that you’ll collaborate with an interdisciplinary epilepsy surgery team to:

• refine management plans
• provide immediate and long-term post-operative patient management

Additionally, you will learn to manage uncommon and rare side effects of pharmacologic therapy, as well as identify patients who are appropriate candidates for antiepileptic drug titration, change, weaning and withdrawal.

Our training will help you recognize patients who are pharmacoresistant and those who are candidates for nonpharmacologic therapy, such as ketogenic diet and hormonal therapy.

Are you looking to expand your knowledge about ordering advanced diagnostic tests such as positron emission tomography, single-photon emission computed tomography and magnetic resonance spectroscopy? You’ve come to the right program; we’ll provide you with comprehensive training on these diagnostics tests.

You’ll develop invaluable knowledge about invasive diagnostic tests like intracranial electrodes, the intracarotid sodium amobarbital procedure and cortical stimulation

We’ll also help you recognize indications and implications of less common testing — like genetic and immunologic testing.

With our training, you’ll have no problem explaining limitations, diagnostic yield and cost-effectiveness of various tests.

We will train you to recognize when a patient may have a cognitive, behavioral or psychiatric disorder associated with epilepsy. You will recognize when a patient’s neurological symptoms are of psychiatric origin. With our faculty members’ mentoring, you’ll learn to identify major cognitive, behavioral or psychiatric side effects of anti-epileptic medication's.

You can expect to become comfortable with selecting and utilizing advanced neuropsychological testing relevant to cognitive, behavioral or psychiatric disorders. Further, you will have opportunities to collaborate with psychiatrists to manage these conditions.

Our curriculum ensures that you are thoroughly acquainted with common and rare epilepsy syndromes, as well as uncommon types of seizures.

The experience you’ll gain in our program will provide you with advanced knowledge of seizures and epilepsy classification based on age and other demographic variables.

You’ll learn to incorporate appropriate evidence-based information into patient care while understanding the limits of evidence-based medicine.

On a daily basis, our faculty members demonstrate compassion, sensitivity, respect and responsiveness to patients from all backgrounds. Training alongside these mentors will enhance your ability to provide ethical, patient-centered care.

Further, your experiences in our program will help you analyze complex ethical issues and communicate effectively with families, staff and multidisciplinary teams.

Our program provides protected time and facilities for your research activities.

Throughout your year of training, we’ll encourage you to participate in clinical trials that are conducted by our faculty members. We also recommend that you conduct your own research, with faculty guidance.

We try to motivate our fellows to be leaders in the health care community. That’s why we’ll require you to complete a quality improvement project — a focused and structured effort to achieve better outcomes of a given process. Working on this project will broaden your perspective on why it’s essential to take an active role in improving patient care.

To individualize your training, we enable you to pursue your interests by choosing from multiple electives.

Depending on your interests, you can undertake electives in neuropsychology or neuroradiology — or you can engage in extra research time.

Leadership opportunities are built into our program. Your teaching experience will include:

• guiding neurology and neurosurgery residents who are doing EEG rotations
• reviewing EEGs weekly with the residents on neurology inpatient services
• instructing medical students on neurological physical exams and related topics

We’ll also expect you to take on a leadership role when it comes to educating patients and their caregivers. For instance, you will have opportunities to educate them on:

• disease management, including risks and benefits of treatment options
• seizure first aid
• the use of rescue medications