Bringing CNS Members Together to Make Children’s Lives Better
A conversation following presentation at the 2018 CNS Annual Meeting of the seminar Contemporary Clinical, Ethical and Legal Challenges in the Determination of Brain Death in Infants and Children.
Conversation Participants:
Leon Epstein, MD, PhD
Matthew Kirschen, MD, PhD
Courtney Wusthoff, MD, PhD
Matthew P. Kirschen, MD, PhD, is a pediatric critical care medicine attending physician in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Krischen received his MD and PhD from Stanford University, where he also began his training in pediatrics before moving to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) to complete his training in child neurology. Dr. Kirschen is a member of the CNS Ethics Committee and is a CNS-appointed representative serving on the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Ethics, Law and Humanities Committee. Dr. Kirschen presented at the Ethics Seminar on Brain Death organized by Dr. Courtney Wusthoff for the 2018 CNS Annual Meeting.
Leon Epstein, MD is the Division Head for Neurology at the Anne & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Associate Chair for Research at the Feinberg School of Medicine (FSM) Department of Pediatrics.
Dr. Epstein has been engaged in basic and translational research with continuous NIH funding since 1986. Most of his prior research was in the area of neurovirology in particular investigating human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). He has served as the program director (PI) for two multi-center studies of cognitive impairment in HIV infected individuals and he has directed several randomized controlled clinical trials and conducted longitudinal studies using quantitative MR imaging methods in this condition.
Dr. Epstein has served the CNS as two-term Chair of the CNS Ethics Committee and as the CNS-appointed representative on the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Ethics, Law and Humanities Committee; he currently serves as vice-chair of that committee for the AAN.
Dr. Courtney Wusthoff is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Stanford University and the Neurology Director for the Neonatal Neuro-ICU at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. Dr. Wusthoff’s clinical and research focuses on neonatal neurology and the use of EEG in critical care. She earned her undergraduate degree from Columbia University, and her MD from the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her pediatrics residency at the Children’s Hospital of Oakland, followed by child neurology residency and pediatric epilepsy and clinical neurophysiology fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Prior to her current position, she served as a consultant perinatal neurologist at the Hammersmith Hospital and Imperial College Healthcare in London.