Asian and Oceanian Outstanding Achievement Epilepsy Award (AOEA) 2025

Prof. Dr. Heung Dong Kim is a Professor of Neurology at Yonsei University, Korea. He is a pioneer in dietary therapy, in which he modified the traditional dietary protocol, making it more tolerable, and his publication in Pediatrics 2004 is now widely accepted as a standard.

He led the ILAE Dietary Task Force in 2016 and chaired the “6th Global Symposium on Ketogenic Therapies for Neurological Disorders”. In 2018, ILAE Dietary Task Force-endorsed workshops were held in Myanmar, Bali and Bandung (Indonesia), and Mongolia. In 2019, these workshops were held in Shenzhen (China), Manila (Philippine) and Tashkent (Uzbeckistan).

He pioneered resective surgery for Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and introduced resective surgery in MRI-negative paediatric populations. His collaborative research led to key discoveries of somatic mutation in the mTOR gene in FCD, published in Nature Medicine in 2015.

Prof. Kim developed exchange programs and educational courses for over 40 medical professionals, including doctors, nurses, and EEG technologists from Uzbekistan, Mongolia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Nepal, and many others. He also spent six months as a lifetime exchange professor at the Mongolian National University of Medical Science, helping to establish an advanced epilepsy centre. He also developed an epilepsy surgery program in Bali, Indonesia, in 2023 as a visiting professor at Siloam Hospital, Bali, Indonesia.