Emanuela Voinescu, MD, PhD, is a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA, who focuses her clinical and research efforts on improving the care of women with epilepsy. She obtained her medical degree from University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Romania, and her doctoral degree from Harvard University, prior to completing the Partners Neurology Residency and a 2-year fellowship in clinical neurophysiology/epilepsy at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA.

Dr. Voinescu started doing research at Caltech,  as a summer undergraduate fellow in Dr. Mary B Kennedy’s lab, she then pursued a PhD at Harvard University, in Dr. Joshua R Sanes lab, and got a solid training in the molecular underpinning of synaptic specificity and plasticity. Under the mentorship of Dr. Pennell since residency, her clinical research so far aimed to optimize the selection of the antiepileptic regimen in the preconception settings and fine-tune it to adequately compensate for the specific drug clearance changes during pregnancy. Dr. Voinescu plans to expand her clinical research into translational aspects of how sex hormones and genetic variability influence neuronal excitability and implicitly epilepsy pathophysiology, but also response to medications.