What first motivated you to study epilepsy research for your PhD and what was the main question you were trying to answer?
My motivation for epilepsy research developed during my MSc postgraduate degree, when I undertook a research internship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and later worked for several years as a Research Specialist bridging clinical and computational neuroscience. Working directly with people with epilepsy in the epilepsy monitoring unit made clear the urgent need for better tools to understand where seizures originate and how treatment decisions can be improved.
I began my PhD at Newcastle University with the central aim of understanding how abnormalities across different brain tissues and types of brain recordings can be combined to better identify the regions that cause seizures, with the goal of improving epilepsy surgery planning and outcomes.
What were the key findings from your work, and why are they important for epilepsy research?
My research showed that the brain changes causing seizures aren’t limited to one type of tissue or test. Instead, seizure-generating areas show combined changes across grey matter, white matter, MRI scans, and brain activity recordings. By looking at all these measures together, my work found that combining them gives a better prediction of surgical outcomes than any single test alone.
These findings are important because they move epilepsy surgery planning beyond a one-dimensional approach, offering a more comprehensive and biologically informed framework for pinpointing the brain areas that cause seizures. This has the potential to improve seizure freedom rates while also helping to preserve cognitive function following surgery.
How did support from the Epilepsy Research Institute contribute to your PhD journey?
Support from the Epilepsy Research Institute was fundamental to my PhD journey. The Doctoral Training Centre provided not only financial support but also access to a highly interdisciplinary training environment that combined neuroscience, clinical epilepsy, and advanced computational methods.
Crucially, the Institute also enabled direct engagement with people with epilepsy through the SHAPE network. Having the opportunity to speak directly with patients and hear their lived experiences provided invaluable insight into the real-world challenges of epilepsy. These perspectives shaped how I framed my research questions and reinforced the importance of developing tools that are not only scientifically rigorous, but also clinically meaningful and patient-centred.
The Institute fostered a strong sense of community and purpose, reinforcing the importance of translational research that directly benefits people living with epilepsy. This support was instrumental in helping me develop academic independence alongside clinically relevant research outputs.
What are your plans now that you’ve completed your PhD, and what are you most excited about next?
Following my PhD, I’m focused on developing my research into practical tools to help doctors identify seizure-causing brain areas. Working closely with my PhD supervisor, Peter Taylor, I am focusing on commercialising cloud-based computational methods that can support clinicians in epilepsy surgery planning.
What excites me most is seeing these research advances move beyond the lab and into real-world clinical workflows, where they have the potential to directly improve surgical and cognitive outcomes for people with epilepsy.
Finally, is there any advice you would give to prospective PhD students considering a career in epilepsy research?
I would encourage prospective PhD students to stay closely connected to the clinical realities of epilepsy and, wherever possible, to the people affected by it. That perspective is invaluable and helps ensure research remains grounded and meaningful. Epilepsy research is inherently interdisciplinary, so being open to developing skills beyond your original training, such as computational or engineering approaches, can be extremely powerful.
Finally, I would advise students to think early about translation and impact. Research that bridges discovery and clinical application has the greatest potential to change lives, and epilepsy research is an area where those contributions can make a real difference.
