Hisako Fujiwara, PhD

My areas of research interest include epilepsy, neurophysiology, the seizure network and cognitive neuroscience. I’ve always been curious about how the brain works, and it fascinates me that it is still not fully understood.

My work aims to contribute to the body of knowledge for understanding fully how the brain works. While I was in the senior year of my undergrad program, I joined a clinical lab to study patients with epilepsy, particularly those who were not cured with anti-seizure medication. The overarching purpose of my research is to understand the epilepsy network and improve seizure outcomes of patients with drug-resistant epilepsy and newly diagnosed epilepsy using translational and clinical approaches.

I use advanced mathematical and statistical analysis in my research, including functional connectivity and graph theory. My work aims to predict seizure outcomes and treatment responses. I use a state-of-art noninvasive tool called Magnetoencephalography (MEG) that records magnetic fields of electrical activity to locate their source inside the brain. For patients who undergo noninvasive presurgical evaluation, we want to find better tools that precisely detect where the seizure is coming from and understand the seizure network of individual patients to predict their surgical outcome.

I am honored to have been awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the American Epilepsy Society (2020). I began my work with Cincinnati Children’s in 2006 as a neurodiagnostic technologist. I’m now a neuroscientist and a manager of MEG Core at Cincinnati Children’s.