Michael Prize 2025 Neurology, neuropediatrics, neurosurgery

Maxime Baud is a neuroscientist and neurologist who is currently professor and head of the Epilepsy Unit at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He was trained as a neuroscientist at the Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL), obtaining a PhD under the supervision of Professor Magistretti. He then trained to become a neurologist at the University of California in San Francisco and did a post-doctoral fellowship with Professor E. Chang also at UCSF. He worked in Geneva for a few years before establishing his research and clinical work in Bern.

His main contributions to epilepsy research are in the field of chronobiology, the study of cycles influencing the occurrence of epileptic seizures and interictal EEG discharges. Whereas patients often report that their seizures occur with some temporal regularity, it has been very difficult to make scientific observations about such cycles. Dr. Baud took advantage of EEG recordings lasting several months and even years in patients having an implanted responsive stimulation device designed to reduce seizure frequency, which recorded the EEG for very long periods. Making use of these unique data and performing sophisticated statistical analyses specially designed to reveal periodicities, he was able to demonstrate that the epileptic activity in many patients follows several rhythmic patterns within a day and across many days. These studies, published in prestigious journals such as Lancet Neurology, JAMA Neurology and Annals of Neurology, have demonstrated that patients go through periods of enhanced susceptibility to seizures, that this susceptibility can be assessed with interictal epileptic discharges and that the cyclicity is patient-specific.

At the beginning of this century, there was much hope that it was possible to predict the occurrence of seizures a few minutes or seconds ahead of time. It rapidly became clear that our hopes were based on insufficiently strong statistical tests and that we were really not able to predict seizures. The work of Dr. Baud has shifted the emphasis from precise seizure prediction to the search for periods when seizures are more likely, i.e. periods of enhanced seizure susceptibility. In his most recent research, Dr. Baud is using experimental animal models to reproduce and explain the long-term cycles he has observed in humans.

One of the most debilitating effect of epileptic seizures has always been their unpredictability. Dr. Baud’s research has reduced the level of unpredictability of seizures, thus making a fundamental contribution to our understanding of epilepsy.