Best Epilepsy Neurologists in California

Stanford Health Care, Stanford | Temporal lobe epilepsy, medication safety, neurocognition

Kimford Meador, MD, is Professor of Neurology and Clinical Director of the Stanford Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at Stanford Health Care, which also serves patients through Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford. His clinical focus includes complex epilepsy, the cognitive effects of seizure medications, and epilepsy management during pregnancy. He is among the most-cited epilepsy researchers in the country, with more than 600 published works.

His research addresses some of the most consequential questions patients ask — not just whether a medication controls seizures, but what it does to memory, mood, and fetal development.

A 2006 multicenter study published in The Lancet Neurology that Dr. Meador contributed to identified a practical two-question screening tool for major depression in epilepsy patients — a population where depression often goes undetected because both conditions share overlapping symptoms ¹. Depression affects roughly one in three people with epilepsy and directly worsens seizure control when untreated. A 2008 systematic review he led in Epilepsy Research synthesized data from pregnancy registries worldwide to quantify the risks of specific anti-seizure medications on fetal outcomes — work that now informs what neurologists tell women with epilepsy who are pregnant or planning to become pregnant ². His group also contributed to the development of laser amygdalohippocampotomy (SLAH) for temporal lobe epilepsy, showing that MRI-guided laser surgery could spare naming and recognition functions that open skull surgery more often disrupts ³. Suicide risk in epilepsy — another under-recognized comorbidity — is an area he has also studied directly ⁴.

Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles | Juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, clinical neurophysiology, EEG

John Stern, MD, directs the Epilepsy Clinical Program in UCLA's Department of Neurology and serves as Medical Director of UCLA's Seizure Disorder Center, where he also runs the Epilepsy Fellowship Training Program. His clinical work covers the full range of seizure disorders in adults, with particular depth in juvenile myoclonic epilepsy and EEG-based diagnostics.

His contribution to a 2018 New England Journal of Medicine study identified a genetic variant in a gene called ICK (intestinal-cell kinase) that appears in roughly 7 percent of patients with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy — a common form of epilepsy that tends to begin in adolescence and is often misdiagnosed for years ⁵. The study also explained a cellular mechanism behind the characteristic polyspike EEG pattern seen in these patients, which may eventually point toward more targeted treatments than the broad-spectrum medications used today. For patients or families dealing with a JME diagnosis — especially one that has been hard to control — understanding the genetic underpinning can change how the condition is framed and managed.

Stanford Health Care, Stanford | Drug-resistant epilepsy, seizure surgery evaluation, responsive neurostimulation

Robert Fisher, MD, PhD, is the Maslah Saul MD Professor and Director of the Stanford Epilepsy Center. He has been caring for people with epilepsy for decades and is one of the most prominent figures in how epilepsy is defined and classified internationally.

He co-authored the 2017 International League Against Epilepsy paper that revised how seizure types are classified — replacing outdated terms like "complex partial" and "secondarily generalized" with a cleaner system that distinguishes focal from generalized onset and incorporates whether awareness is preserved ⁶. That classification framework is now used by every neurologist, insurance company, and clinical trial protocol that deals with epilepsy. For patients, it means the terminology your doctor uses today reflects where the science actually is. His 2000 paper documenting how epilepsy affects quality of life from the patient's perspective remains one of the more cited examples of research that put patient experience at the center of epilepsy outcomes measurement ⁷. His foundational work on animal models of epilepsy, published in 1989, helped establish the preclinical framework researchers still use to test new treatments ⁸. His current clinical focus at Stanford includes drug-resistant epilepsy, evaluation for seizure surgery, and responsive neurostimulation — devices implanted in the brain that detect and interrupt seizure activity in real time.

UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles | Refractory focal epilepsy, MEG-guided surgery, brain stimulation

Dawn Eliashiv, MD, is Professor of Neurology and Co-Director of the UCLA Seizure Disorders Center. Her clinical focus is refractory focal epilepsy — cases where seizures persist despite medications — and the advanced diagnostic and neuromodulation options available for those patients.

Her 2002 study in Neurology showed that ictal magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings — captured during actual seizures — can localize the seizure onset zone as precisely as invasive electrode recordings in patients with neocortical epilepsy, potentially reducing the need for surgically implanted grids ⁹. For patients being evaluated for seizure surgery, MEG offers a non-invasive way to map where seizures start. Her research with intracranial EEG has also documented how the medial temporal lobe generates theta-frequency oscillations during real-world movement in epilepsy patients who have had electrodes implanted for clinical monitoring ¹⁰ — work that informs how memory and navigation networks are mapped before surgery to avoid damaging them. She has published in Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and eLife on the neuroscience of memory, directly relevant to how temporal lobe epilepsy surgery is planned when seizures originate near memory-critical tissue.

UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco | Adult epilepsy, translational neuroscience, network-based treatments

Vikram Rao, MD, PhD, is Distinguished Professor in Neurology at UCSF, where he sees adult epilepsy patients at UCSF Medical Center and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. His research background spans basic synaptic neuroscience and clinical epilepsy, with particular interest in how excitatory neurotransmitter systems contribute to seizure generation.

His work on glutamate receptors — specifically NMDA and AMPA receptors — has helped clarify how these channels change their behavior in ways relevant to seizure susceptibility and medication targets ¹¹. These receptors are what many anti-seizure drugs and several experimental therapies act on, and understanding their plasticity is part of why some patients develop tolerance or treatment resistance over time. His dual training in neuroscience research and clinical neurology puts him at the intersection of basic science and patient care, which matters for patients whose epilepsy has not responded to standard medications and who want a neurologist thinking about mechanism, not just next medication choices.

UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital San Francisco, San Francisco | Pediatric epilepsy, Dravet syndrome, genetic epilepsies

Joseph Sullivan, MD, is the Murphy Parker Endowed Professor in Pediatric Epilepsy at UCSF and the director of pediatric epilepsy services at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital San Francisco. He specializes in children with complex, treatment-resistant, or genetically defined epilepsies — including Dravet syndrome, which is caused by mutations in the SCN1A gene and typically begins in the first year of life.

He contributed to the 2015 Pediatrics study that gave the first reliable estimate of how many children in the United States have Dravet syndrome — about 1 in 15,700 live births — which was important both for clinical planning and for pushing awareness of a diagnosis that is frequently missed or delayed ¹². More recently, his work on genetic testing in childhood epilepsy showed that combining standard sequence analysis with intragenic copy number variant detection increased diagnostic yield substantially — roughly a quarter of children with unexplained epilepsy carry a pathogenic variant that standard gene panels miss ¹³. For families who have received a vague "epilepsy of unknown cause" diagnosis and are wondering whether genetic testing would add anything, that finding is directly relevant. Dr. Sullivan sees patients at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in San Francisco and accepts referrals for second opinions on pediatric epilepsy cases.