Speaker Profile

Biography
Dr. Paz earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. As a graduate student, she studied the role of basal ganglia in regulating absence epilepsy and received an award for the best neuroscience PhD thesis in France. Dr. Paz then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, where she developed the first closed-loop optogenetic control of seizures that led her to identify seizure control points in the brain https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=68850. Dr. Paz is an internationally recognized leader in the study of epilepsy and has made seminal contributions to our understanding of the cellular and neural circuit mechanisms underlying epilepsy. Using rodent models, Dr. Paz’s team was the first to develop an optogenetic approach that allows us to detect and abort epileptic seizures in real-time by targeting one specific cell type.