Ghassan Makhoul, a biomedical engineering graduate student at Vanderbilt, has received a prestigious grant – as well as three other awards – to advance his research in the study of epilepsy.
The F31 grant provides predoctoral students with mentored research training to support dissertation research and career development in health-related fields. Makhoul focused the grant on understanding how the brain naturally fights seizures in patients with epilepsy.
“We work with patients who get brain surgery to treat their seizures and that presents us with a chance to record their brain activity intracranially,” said Makhoul, who is a member of the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering. “We analyzed data from these brain implants to understand how seizures initiate; is it more of a tug of war between protective mechanisms in the brain or do those protective mechanisms go off duty and allow for seizure activity to ramp up.”
Makhoul also received a Grass Foundation Young Investigator Award, an Early Career Travel Fellowship Grant from the North American Neuromodulation Society (NANS), and the Edward Ferguson Jr. Graduate Award from Vanderbilt.
The Grass Foundation Award recognizes outstanding young investigators conducting research in basic or clinical neuroscience related to epilepsy. Makhoul said the Grass Foundation and NANS awards resulted from an abstract he submitted investigating patterns of seizures during sleep.
He said the Ferguson award will be used to buy lab equipment to work on closed loop, neurostimulation therapies for seizure prevention.