Samantha Bottom-Tanzer

Traumatic brain injury can lead to cognitive, motor, and behavioral dysfunction as well as posttraumatic epilepsy (PTE). Many factors influence whether a patient develops PTE, and there is often a prolonged latency period between the initial injury and the onset of epilepsy providing a window in which to prophylactically intervene. I’m interested in discovering biomarkers of PTE using mesoscale in vivo widefield cortical calcium and glutamate imaging, EEG, and intracranial high-density multi-electrode arrays. By determining which animals eventually develop PTE, we can retrospectively assess for biomarkers in the days following injury and develop models to predict the development of PTE with the goal of facilitating targeted prophylactic intervention.