Jordan Farrell, PhD

Dr. Farrell aims to understand how basic mechanisms that support healthy brain functions become hijacked in epilepsy to drive pathophysiology. He discovered that a stroke-like event occurring after seizures is responsible for long-lasting behavioral impairments and is driven by the overproduction of blood flow regulating lipids, which has directly led to two clinical trials. His lab’s most recent focus is unravelling how local circuit and large-scale network mechanisms, which normally control memory processes, become substrates for hypersynchronous, pathological activity in epilepsy. To translate their findings, his group develops non-invasive ultrasound approaches to re-tune neural circuits with high spatial and cell type-specific precision.

Dr. Farrell is an Faculty Member in Neurology at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member of the Rosamund Stone Zander Translational Neuroscience Center and F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. He received his PhD from the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary in Canada under the mentorship of Cam Teskey and did his postdoctoral research with Ivan Soltesz at Stanford University, where he received the K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the NIH National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.