Medical Engineering Distinguished Seminar Series, Sridevi Sarma

Professor Sridevi Sarma develops computational, data-driven, and biological approaches to advance the knowledge and treatment of diseases of the nervous system including epilepsy, chronic pain, Parkinson's disease, and insomnia. She also harnesses dynamical systems and control theory to understand how the brain governs complex behaviors, including motor control and decision making.

Sarma, who is the associate director of Hopkins' Institute of Computational Medicine (ICM), founded and directs the Neuromedical Control Systems Lab (NCSL). The mission of NCSL is to develop knowledge and computational tools that can be translated into the clinic. As an example, her groundbreaking research and tools are helping to shape treatment of epilepsy. Drug treatment does not work for 30 percent of the world's 60-million-plus epilepsy sufferers. Hope for these patients lies in removal of the brain's epileptogenic zone (EZ), where seizures originate. Currently, EZ localization is done manually through the daunting visual inspection of hundreds of intracranial EEG recordings. Within six-months post-surgery, there is an average of 50 percent chance of seizure recurrence, most likely caused by misidentification and/or nonresection of the entire EZ.