Alfredo Gonzalez Sulser

Recent advances in systems neuroscience have shifted the understanding of brain functions from being attributed to individual nuclei or regions, to instead being distributed or at least mediated by multiple interacting anatomical areas or cellular populations. Similarly, it is becoming increasingly clear that in epilepsy, seizures and pathological activity emerge from large-scale cellular networks. Consequently, comorbidities such as memory loss, sleep abnormalities, neurodevelopmental delay and severe autistic behaviours can be both a cause, or consequence, of pathological activity related to epilepsy.

As a lab, we study genetic and induced in vivo animal models of epileptic encephalopathies and temporal lobe epilepsy utilizing cutting edge electrophysiological recording techniques.  We are focused on deciphering how seizures emerge and propagate throughout the brain and how these events relate to other behavioural phenotypes. Additionally, we are in the search of clinically-translatable biomarkers by performing connectivity analyses to understand how ongoing brain activity relates to the disease state. Furthermore, we are developing circuit-based interventions to ameliorate and reverse epilepsy-related pathologies.