European Young Investigator Award 2018

Sylvain Rheims, PU-PH

Sylvain Rheims started his neurology residency in Lyon in 2003 where he immediately devoted his career to epilepsy. Early in his residency, he spent three full years and obtained his PhD in Neurosciences at Mediterranean Institute for Neurobiology in Marseille thanks to a prestigious INSERM grant. He then came back to clinic to finish his residency and perform an epilepsy fellowship. At 36, he was appointed head of Department of Functional Neurology and Epilepsy in Lyon, one of the most active epilepsy surgery centers in Europe, and co-chair of an INSERM/CNRS laboratory specialized in translational research in epilepsy (TIGER, CRNL, INSERM U1025, CNRS 5292). He was also appointed as full professor of Neurology at University Claude Bernard Lyon-1 in September 2017. He coordinates the French National Reference Center for Rare Epilepsies in Lyon and is deeply involved in the European Reference Network for rare and complex epilepsies (EPICARE), especially in the field of epilepsy surgery and clinical trials.

Pr Rheims has published 71 pubmed referenced papers, including 42 as first or last authors. His clinical research skills cover the field of clinical epilepsy, including SUDEP, epilepsy surgery and clinical trials, and also biostatistics (including meta-analysis), and experimental epilepsy. His main research topics are evaluation of efficacy and safety of new antiepileptic treatments and development of innovative therapeutic strategies for epilepsy comorbidities, especially in the field of SUDEP, which has progressively become his main research axis.

Video interview