Joline Fan
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Neuroscience·Early-career
About a third of the 46 million people with active epilepsy do not respond to medication. Neuromodulation therapies, which stimulate the brain to gradually reshape the networks that produce seizures, can help, but doctors still manage them largely by trial and error because no one knows which network properties make the brain more or less seizure-prone.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
epilepsy
sleep
magnetoencephalography
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Identify physiologic brain network dynamics across sleep and wake states in patients with focal epilepsy, using magnetoencephalography (MEG) combined with diffusion tensor imaging and tractography of white-matter connections.
- Find state-dependent network features that predict interictal epileptiform activity, abnormal spikes between seizures, in MEG recordings from patients with focal epilepsy.
- Develop biophysical models of pathologic brain network states to explain how networks reconfigure into seizure-prone states.
More about the research
Sleep offers a natural experiment: as people cycle through wake and sleep stages, brain networks shift through a wide range of states that carry different seizure risk.
Why it matters
People with drug-resistant epilepsy could benefit from more rational neuromodulation treatments. By identifying brain network features that signal high or low seizure potential, this work may help clinicians guide therapies that steer networks toward less seizure-prone states, rather than adjusting them by trial and error.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Hui Lin
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Build White Matter Infiltrative Risk maps by identifying which white matter tracts glioblastoma tends to invade across more than 500 patients and combining them with each patient's DTI fiber density maps.
Jennifer A Mcnab
Stanford University, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Develop and validate diffusion MRI cortical fiber mapping, which infers tissue microstructure from how water moves in the brain, to detect the disrupted cortical architecture inside focal cortical dysplasias, using 3D histology as ground truth.
Nishant Sinha
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Build scalable pipelines that automatically aggregate and jointly analyze structural MRI, intracranial EEG (IEEG) and clinical data from multiple epilepsy centers, so analyses generalize across sites.
The school
University of California-San Francisco: 89 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 164 research doctorates a year.
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