Wael Asaad, MD, PhD is the Director of the Functional and Epilepsy Neurosurgery Programs at Rhode Island Hospital and Associate Professor of Neurosurgery and Neuroscience as well as Ophthalmology and Visual Science in the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Dr. Asaad received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College in 1993, then earned a PhD in systems neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001, and his MD from Yale University in 2003. Dr. Asaad completed a general surgery internship and neurosurgical residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital. During his residency, he undertook additional training in functional neurosurgery. In 2011, he joined the department of neurosurgery at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Dr. Asaad’s clinical interests include functional neurosurgery for epilepsy, movement disorders and psychiatric disease, traumatic brain injury, and general neurosurgery of the brain and spine. His basic science interests focus on the ways in which neuronal circuits in the frontal cortex and basal ganglia underlie visual-motor learning, memory and decision-making, and how a better understanding of these might lead to strategies to alleviate the cognitive aspects of psychiatric and neurological diseases.

Andrew S. Blum, MD, PhD is Deputy Chief of Neurology, Director of Adult Epilepsy, the EEG Laboratory, and the Comprehensive Epilepsy Program at Rhode Island Hospital and is Professor and Vice Chair of Neurology at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Dr. Blum received a BA from Yale University (’82), followed by combined MD - PhD training at Cornell University Medical College (’89) and The Rockefeller University (Wiesel Laboratory, ’88). After a medical internship at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Dr. Blum completed neurology residency training and a fellowship in neuromuscular diseases at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He then completed fellowship training in clinical neurophysiology and epilepsy at Harvard--Beth Israel Hospital. Dr. Blum remained on faculty at Harvard--Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center until coming to Brown and Rhode Island Hospital in 2000. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology and the American Epilepsy Society and is a member of the American Clinical Neurophysiology Society. Dr. Blum is a past Chair, Board of Directors, of the Epilepsy Foundation of New England and a past Trustee of the Grass Foundation. He is board-certified in Neurology, Clinical Neurophysiology, and Epilepsy. Dr. Blum’s academic interests include epilepsy co-morbidities (cognitive and psychiatric, especially psychogenic non-epileptic seizures-- PNES), autonomic correlates of seizures (e.g., respiratory and cardiac), machine learning-based wearable technologies in seizure management, and epilepsy in the elderly. Dr. Blum created and co-edited The Clinical Neurophysiology Primer (Springer, 2007), a widely used textbook for residents and fellows.