Professional background

Simona Balestrini is a consultant neurologist at the Chalfont Centre for Epilepsy and National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, UCLH, and honorary senior lecturer at UCL/Institute of Neurology. She qualified in medicine and completed her specialist training in neurology at the Polytechnic University of Marche, Ancona, Italy.

During her specialty training she undertook a research fellowship at UCL with focus on epilepsy genetics, and a further fellowship at the “Claudio Munari” Epilepsy Surgery Unit, Niguarda Hospital, Milan, Italy, with focus on neurophysiology and surgical treatment of epilepsy. She subsequently was awarded a PhD for her research on SUDEP.

She has a special interest in epilepsy genetics, and runs epilepsy clinics and epilepsy genomics clinics at the Chalfont Centre. Her current research focuses on the application of genomics to understand the causes, course and treatment response of epilepsy.

Specialties

Research interests

  • Epilepsy
  • Epilepsy genomics
  • Neurophysiology
  • SUDEP

Languages spoken

Italian

Publications