RESEARCH THEME

Timothy A. Pedley, M.D. is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor ofNeurology and Chairman of the Department of Neurology at ColumbiaUniversity's College of Physicians and Surgeons, andNeurologist-in-Chief at the Neurological Insti­tute of New YorkPresbyterian Hospital at Columbia University Medical Center in New YorkCity.  Dr. Pedley received his BA degree from Pomona College and his MDdegree from Yale University. He trained in neurology at StanfordUniversity and obtained additional experience in child neurology at theUniversity of Colorado, after which he was a postdoctoral fellow incellular neurophysiology with Professor David A. Prince and in clinicalEEG and epilepsy with Dr. Barry R. Tharp, both at Stanford.  In 1978,Dr. Pedley was a Research Fellow in Experimental Neurology withProfessor Brian S. Meldrum in London, and in 1979 joined the Faculty ofMedicine at Columbia University.

Dr. Pedley has devoted his entire professional career toepilepsy and made both basic laboratory and clinical contributions tothe field.  He has had laboratory interests in the role played by theionic microenvironment in abnormal hippocampal and corticalexcitability, and in long-lasting changes in hippocampal excitabilityinduced by repeated seizures.  More recently, Dr. Pedley has beencollaborating in family studies of epilepsy, identification of genesassociated with human epilepsy syndromes, and epilepsy surgery.  Amonghis many publications related to clinical neurophysiology and epilepsy,Dr. Pedley is co-editor with Dr. John Ebersole of Current Practice of Clinical EEG, now in its third edition, and, with Jerome Engel, Jr., of the 3-volume work, Epilepsy: A Comprehensive Textbook, the second edition of which is now in preparation.

Dr. Pedley is President-Elect of the American NeurologicalAssociation, and he is also active in the American Academy ofNeurology, where he is Secretary of the Board of Directors and Chairmanof the Meeting Management Committee.  Dr. Pedley has beenPresident of the American EEG Society, the American Epilepsy Society,and the Epilepsy Foundation of America where he was later Chairman ofthe Board.  He was Editor-in-Chief of Epilepsia, theinternational professional journal of epilepsy, from 1994 to 2001, andhe has also served on the Executive Committee of the InternationalLeague Against Epilepsy.  Dr. Pedley has been listed consistently as a“Best Doctor” in the major surveys of physicians, both in New York andacross the United States.   He has received many honors and awards forhis work, and he has been a visiting professor at universities andhospitals in countries around the world.