Stanford Comprehensive Epilepsy Program Team

Jin Hahn, MD
Professor of Neurology & Neurological Sciences and Pediatrics

Dr. Hahn is a Child Neurologist who studies brain development, epilepsy and conditions such as dysplasia and holoprosencephaly, in which the two overlap. Dr. Hahn received his MD from Harvard in 1982. After residency training in pediatrics and child neurology at Harvard in 1987, he came to Stanford to do a neurophysiology fellowship. After a brief faculty position at UCSD, he returned to Stanford In 1991 to become the Chief of Neurology Service at Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford. His research interests are in the areas of neonatal seizures and electoencephalography, neonatal neurology, hypoxic ischemic brain injury and seizure disorders in the first year of life.

Brenda Porter, MD
Professor of Neurology & Neurological Sciences and Pediatrics

Dr. Porter has 15 years of experience in taking care of children with epilepsy. Taking care of children with epilepsy and trying to provide them with the best opportunity for seizure freedom, social and emotional well-being is the goal of her practice.  She has expertise in medical, surgical and dietary therapy for intractable epilepsy.  She directs the Stanford Tuberous Sclerosis Clinic. Her research has focused on improving outcomes in epilepsy surgery and designing therapies for the prevention of epilepsy in at risk patients.  Dr. Porter sees patients at Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital.

Christopher Lee-Messer, MD, PhD
Clinical Assistant Professor of Neurology & Neurological Sciences and Pediatrics

Dr. Lee-Messer’s chief clinical focus is in pediatric epilepsy, especially the relationship between stroke and epilepsy. His translational and basic science interests lie in neuronal development and physiology, and in using that knowledge to create treatments for disease, especially in the injured developing brain. To investigate these subjects, he is currently participating as a fellow in the Deisseroth lab, combining techniques of in vivo and in vitro electrophysiology with optogenetics.

Courtney Wusthoff, MD
Assistant Professor of Neurology & Neurological Sciences and Pediatrics

Dr. Courtney Wusthoff is the Neurology Director for the Neuro Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. She received her BA in neuroscience and behavior at Columbia University in New York, and her MD at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Wusthoff completed her pediatrics residency at Children's Hospital Oakland, and her neurology and neurophysiology training at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. After her fellowship, Dr. Wusthoff served as Consultant in Perinatal Neurology at the Hammersmith Hospital and Imperial College in London. Her special expertise is in neonatal EEG, neonatal seizures, and complications of newborn brain injury. She also has a major interest in brain monitoring in critically ill infants and children.

Lawrence Shuer, MD
Professor of Neurosurgery
Associate Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery

Dr. Shuer performs surgical procedures on patients with uncontrolled seizures. Hetrained in surgery, neurosurgery and neuropathology at Stanford and joined the faculty in 1984.  He has been part of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Team at Stanford since 1992. His interests in neurosurgery include the management of craniofacial anomalies, degenerative spine disorders, syringomyelia, surgical treatment of epilepsy and hypothermic brain protection. He was a consultant for Neuropace as it developed the responsive brain stimulator for medically refractory epilepsy. He is past president of the California Association of Neurological Surgeons, past president of the Western Neurosurgical Society and is chair of the California Medical Association Scientific Advisory Panel on Neurosurgery.

Michael S. B. Edwards, MD
Emeritus Faculty, Neurosurgery

Casey H. Halpern, MD
Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery

Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery and, by courtesy, of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University Medical Center. Dr. Halpern received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He completed his residency in Neurological Surgery and a fellowship in Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania. He focuses on the surgical treatment of movement disorders and epilepsy and has particular interest in minimally invasive surgical approaches, as well as neurostimulation procedures.

Jaimie Henderson, MD
John and Jene Blume - Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor
Director, Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery

Dr. Henderson is the director of the program in Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery, and has a special interest in movement disorders and epilepsy. Dr. Henderson received his M.D. from Chicago's Rush Medical College in 1988. After completing his residency in Neurosurgery at Saint Louis University and fellowship training in Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery, he started the movement disorders surgery program at St. Louis University where he remained on the faculty for 6 years. He joined the Neurosurgery staff of the Cleveland Clinic in 2001, and Stanford's Neurosurgery Department in 2004. Dr. Henderson is an expert in invasive monitoring for surgical evaluation of patients with drug resistant epilepsy.

Gerald Grant, MD
Professor of Neurosurgery

Dr. Grant received his MD from Stanford University in 1994 and trained as a resident in neurosurgery at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. He then completed a fellowship in pediatric neurosurgery at Seattle Children's Hospital. He entered active duty with the US Air Force and became Director of Surgical Epilepsy at Wilford Hall Medical Center and UT San Antonio. After his deployments to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Dr. Grant moved back to his alma mater at Duke University in 2006. He remained there on the faculty for 7 years as Director of Pediatric Surgical Epilepsy. He was recruited back to Stanford in 2013. Dr. Grant is committed to the treatment of children with intractable epilepsy and is an expert at state-of-the-art brain mapping techniques and awake language mapping in epilepsy patients.

Candice Osuga Lin, MSN, APRN, BC, ACNP
Nurse Practitioner

Candice earned her undegraduate degree in Biological Sciences from the University of California, Davis. She received her Master of Science in Nursing from Vanderbilt University. She is certified as an Acute Care Nurse Practitioner through the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners, and is a member of the American Association of Neurosciences Nursing, American Association of Nurse Practitioners and Sigma Theta Tau.

She has been active in the care of adult neurosurgery patients. Her interests include neuro-oncology and degenerative spine disease.

Michael Zeineh, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Neuroradiology

Dr. Michael Zeineh’s background is in Neurosciences and Medicine from California Technological Institute and UCLA with residency training in Diagnostic Radiology and subspeciality in Neuroradiology from Stanford Medical Center. He has extensive experience studying the hippocampus with MRI and is an expert of advanced quantitative neuroimaging in epilepsy and leads the state-of-the art brain imaging of epilepsy patients with 7 Tesla MR scanner.

Gayle K Deutch, PhD
Staff Neuropsychologist and Associate Professor
Clinical and Research Neuropsychologist

Dr. Deutsch has special expertise in evaluation of brain function in people with epilepsy. She received her doctoral degree in clinical psychology at Drexel University and completed a pre-doctoral internship the University of Pennsylvania and a post-doctoral fellowship in clinical neuropsychology at the Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the Staff Neuropsychologist at the New Jersey Neuroscience Institute and Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Seton Hall University, Graduate School of Medical Education. Her research interests are the neural basis of dyslexia and learning disorders and cognitive disorders in epilepsy.

John Barry, MD
Professor of Psychiatry

Dr. Barry is the Director of the Neuropsychiatry and Psychotherapy Clinics has a special interest in psychiatric problems of people with epilepsy. He has done studies of depression and psychosis in association with epilepsy, and of the psychiatric mimics of seizures, called psychogenic non-epileptic seizure-like events, also known as psychogenic seizures or pseudoseizures. In patients admitted for video-EEG evaluation, he leads the efforts in making the diagnosis of psychogenic disorders and treating the patients disabled by this condition.

Kim Bullock, MD
Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry

Dr. Bullock is certified in the subspecialty of Behavioral Neurology & Neuropsychiatry. She runs an outpatient Neuro-Behavior Clinic and Laboratory with special emphasis on non-pharmacological interventions and  evidenced-based psychotherapies for problems such as psychogenic seizures. Her focus is cognitive behavior group therapy and she trains residents, psychology students and therapists in these methods. She currently is investigating the use of group dialectical behavior for non-epileptic seizures.

Paul Buckmaster, PhD
Professor of Comparative Medicine and Neurology & Neurological Sciences

Dr. Buckmaster is one of the world’s leading scientists working on the anatomy and electrophysiology of temporal lobe epilepsy in animals to discover how brains become epileptic and how spontaneous seizures begin. Dr. Buckmaster's laboratory specializes in the studies of the pathophysiological mechanisms of temporal lobe epilepsy and the neuronal circuitry of temporal lobe structures in normal and epileptic brains.

John Huguenard, PhD
Professor of Neurology & Neurological Sciences

Dr. Huguenard is the director of the Stanford Neuroscience Graduate Program training PhD students involved in the study of the brain. He is also one of the world's leading scientists working on the relationship between the pacemaker area of the brain (thalamus) and the cerebral cortex, and how dysfunction of this interaction can lead to seizures. Dr. Huguenard's laboratory specializes in the study of neuronal mechanisms underlying synchronous oscillatory activity in the thalamus, cortex and their interconnection and genes whose products, mainly ion channels, play key roles in the regulation of thalamocortical network responses.

David A. Prince, MD
Professor of Neurology & Neurological Sciences

Dr. Prince is one of the world’s leading scientists working on the cellular mechanisms of epilepsy. Dr. Prince has trained dozens of the next generation leading epilepsy researchers in the world, and he and his research associates have made major advances in the understanding of the physiology of epilepsy. He is the holder of numerous research awards, including an NIH Javitz Award, the American Epilepsy Society award for excellence in research and epilepsy leadership, and he is a past president of the American Epilepsy Society. Dr. Prince's laboratory specializes in the studies of neuronal excitability and its regulation in the mammalian brains and mechanisms underlying development and prophylaxis of epilepsy in animal models.