Faculty Spotlight: Assistant Professor Sheela Toprani, M.D, Ph.D.
Dr. Sheela Toprani, MD, PhD is an Epileptologist who joined UC Davis as Assistant Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery in July 2021. The consummate scientist, her research bridges the fields of epilepsy, cognitive neuroscience, and neuroengineering, with a direct bridge to impacting patients. Dr. Toprani’s ultimate goal is to provide holistic care to her patients suffering from refractory epilepsy, care that considers the patients’ cognitive and psychosocial function throughout their experience, for the best possible cognitive outcomes.
Having long been interested in understanding the brain from different perspectives, Dr. Toprani carved her own educational path. After pursuing a self-designed major in Neuroscience and Philosophy for her B.S. degree at University of Michigan, she was a pioneer of a new medical school at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine as well as the first doctoral candidate of that program studying for her MD and PhD degrees. The Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine is an innovative medical education program within Case Western Reserve University with a focused mission to attract and educate a limited number of highly qualified persons who seek to become physician investigators. Dr. Toprani completed her medical degree concurrently with her PhD degree at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) as the first Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) candidate of the combined program. Her PhD was in biophysics and physiology, with a concentration in neural engineering. She was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow, award that also provided continued support for a second year of research, and a recipient of the Minerva and Carl Wiggers Prize in Physiology, awarded to the graduating MD/PhD student showing the greatest proficiency in medical physiology.
Dr. Toprani continued her research training with a Neurology Residency at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in the Department of Neurology, where she was a NINDS R25 Training Grant Awardee. She then conducted epilepsy research for her postdoctoral fellowships as well as Clinical Fellowships at Stanford Hospital. Throughout the years, Dr. Toprani followed her interest in learning and in treating epilepsy, a highly prevalent disease, concurrently with discovering how cognition can change between disease states for different patients.
According to the CDC, about 3 million adults and 470,000 children had active epilepsy in the US in 2015. Worldwide, around 50 million people suffer from this chronic disease, making epilepsy one of the most common neurological diseases globally (Source: World Health Organization). Morbidity in epilepsy is compounded by distressing symptoms, such as depression or memory loss, which compromise quality of life. Surgical resection is currently the most effective treatment but comes at the cost of removing parts of the brain that are important for physiological function. Dr. Toprani is passionate about optimizing intracranial brain monitoring techniques and developing network-targeted neuromodulation therapies to reduce the spectrum of symptoms of epilepsy, including seizures and neuropsychological impairments.
The philosophy that roots Dr. Toprani’s work is that meaningful treatments cannot just treat disease based on maps of pathology, but they must incorporate the localization and physiology of brain functions that a person calls upon to live their best life. At UC Davis, there are many opportunities for collaborations with experts in cognitive neuroscience, dynamic brain modeling, single-neuron electrophysiology, and advanced neuroimaging, to better understand the underlying electrophysiology of brain function for the processes that make patients’ days fulfilling as well as of seizure initiation, spread, termination, and prevention. Based on the knowledge gained, Dr. Toprani and her colleagues can improve network-targeted neuromodulation therapies. As technologies continue to improve concurrently with our knowledge of the brain, individualized healthcare can flourish and benefit patients.
With a lifelong learning mindset, Dr. Toprani is increasingly focused on what she can tangibly contribute to the world, in addition to her research and clinical work described above. She is working on developing her research into clinical applications for deciphering electroencephalographs (EEGs) as well as for quantifying and thus improving neurological exams. The best part of such initiatives is working with teams of innovative volunteers of all ages across the world, who are dedicated to improving healthcare tools. With collaborators, Dr. Toprani is researching the factors that impede epilepsy care in low- and middle-income regions, such as stigma, access to resources, or knowledge about the disease, and working to establish education programs and clinics for epilepsy in Cameroon. She recently served as a consultant for complex surgical epilepsy care in Ukraine.
Dr. Toprani received a number of awards throughout her young career. Most recently, her awards include a UC Davis Clinical and Translational Science Center KL2 Mentored Early Career Award, a UC Davis Behavioral Health Center of Excellence (BHCOE) Early Career Award, and an American Epilepsy Society (AES) Research and Training Fellowship for Clinicians Early Career Award. She is passionate about translating engineering solutions for neurological care and is serving as guest editor of an Epilepsy and Neural Engineering issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering combined with Physiological Measurements to promote this mission. She is also collaborating with others to create neuro-innovation programs at UC Davis.