Research and teaching are one of the fundamental pillars of the activity of the Epilepsy Unit.
The Director of the Unit, Dr. Rocamora is Associate Professor at the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and conducts epilepsy classes for undergraduate medical students at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Dr. Aznar, responsible for the pediatric area, is also a university professor. The teaching activity of the Unit of Epilepsy in undergraduate is carried out in the students of medicine and bioengineering. At grade level, the unit conducts short training of 2 months to neurologists in training who come from all over Spain. Training courses are also organized for general neurologists who attend 2 days to train in epilepsy advances. In the postgraduate course, the activity focuses on the direction of doctoral theses. On the other hand, there is also a fellowship for super-specialization in epilepsy of 12 months of duration, whose formative objectives involve the learning of all the diagnostic and therapeutic aspects related to the clinical epileptology, as well as the clinical neurophysiology techniques, specifically the EEG and VEEG.
The unit's staff includes 2 neurologists, 1 neurophysiologist and 2 neuropediatricians all with extensive experience in epilepsy. Of these, at least 4 have a doctorate degree (2 in Germany and 2 in Spain) and all have completed training in centres of recognized international trajectory. At the same time 3 have obtained certifications in adult and pediatric EEG.
The research focuses mainly on cognitive aspects and their correlates with surgical and electrophysiological procedures but also in the pharmacotherapy of epilepsy and genetic diagnosis. For this reason, collaborations with national and international centers have been established, including the Epilepsy Center of the University of Freiburg, the Epilepsy Clinic of Bonn and the Epilepsy Center of Grenoble. At a national level, there are ongoing partnerships with the Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC), The Synthetic Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems Group (SPECS) and the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CGR) of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF).
