Epilepsia^® Prize 2012

Epilepsia is pleased to announce the winner of the 2012 Morris-Coole Epilepsia Prize is Mark R. Bower, Mayo Foundation for medical education and research. Dr. Bower won the prize for his article, "Spatiotemporal neuronal correlates of seizure generation in focal epilepsy" (Mark R. Bower, Matt Stead, Fredric B. Meyer, W. Richard Marsh and Gregory A. Worrell. Epilepsia 53(5):807–816, 2012; DOI: 10.1111/j.1528-1167.2012.03417.x).

Dr. Bower, the recipient of the 2012 (Epilepsia Volume 53) Prize, is Research Fellow in the Department of Neurology at Mayo Clinic, and a member of the Mayo Systems Electrophysiology Laboratory led by Drs. Matt Stead and Gregory A. Worrell.

He received his PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Arizona working with Dr. Bruce McNaughton on place cells and cognitive map formation in freely-moving animals. His postdoctoral fellowship, with Dr. Paul Buckmaster at Stanford University, involved recording the activity of multiple single neurons prior to and during seizures in the pilocarpine model of epilepsy; he was awarded the Eric W. Lothman Fellowship by the Epilepsy Foundation for this work.

At Mayo Clinic, Dr. Bower has helped translate the recording and analytical techniques developed in animal models to long-term, continuous recordings from patients undergoing treatment for epilepsy. His research centers on understanding how ongoing neuronal activity progresses into seizures, and on identifying robust biomarkers of impending seizures from the activity of multiple single neurons – with the goal of providing new therapies for epilepsy patients.