Past Recipients

From July 01, 2019 to March 12, 2020, I was received by Dr. Laurent VERCUEIL as part of my internship for the fellowship awarded by IFCN. NSFT department of GRENOBLE University Hospital comprises three precious units in clinical neurophysiology namely: electroencephalogram (EEG), electroneuromyogram (EMNG) and evoked potentials (PE) (Auditory, visual, somesthetic, cognitive and motor) with a readily available pedagogical and training team including three senior university doctors and an assistant specialist in Neuropediatrics. By completing this internship, I will surely be able to perform and read these exams with confidence.

I am Dr. Youssouf BEN MOH, neurologist and neurophysiologist from Rabat – Morocco. I was lucky to beneficiate from the IFCN support to start my training in Paris. I started an internship in the department of clinical neurophysiology of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital group in Paris – France. Under the supervision of Dr Thierry Maisonobe, an international neuromuscular diseases expert, I developed new skills about realizing, reasoning and interpreting ENMG based on clinical presentation, as I got familiarized with genetic tests, and second- and third-line biologic tests that should be performed depending on the form of peripheral neuropathy or myopathy. As my department in Morocco is considered a national and African referral unit for neuromuscular diseases and epilepsy, I will fully get engaged in practicing my new skills, and transmitting my knowledge among my colleagues inside and outside the country.

The internship at the Clinical Neurophysiology Department at the University Hospital of Rabat, in the framework of the scholarship awarded to me by the IFCN for the year 2017, was enormously beneficial and had an impact on my career. The EEG, ENMG, and Evoked potential are carried out. For this purpose, I learned how to carry out its technics, read and interpret them. During my stay, I had the opportunity to participate in several scientific activities as well as research activities. I participated in 4 advanced courses of the IBRO organized at the University Mohammed V. I also took the opportunity to study and obtain a university degree in ENMG. My challenge now is to popularize clinical neurophysiology in Cameroon. Most of our patients are followed up for “peripheral neuropathy” without an electrophysiological diagnosis. Even at the level of Central Africa, there is no reference center for Clinical Neurophysiology exploration. The creation of a neurophysiological exploration center will be my first objective, secondly, will educate and inform my colleagues about this field.

I am currently a faculty member of Department of Neurology, College of Health Sciences, Addis Ababa University with a rank of Assistant Professor of Neurology. I am mainly engaged in treating patients with neurological disorders, teaching clinical neurology to undergraduate and graduate students, reading EEG and performing NCS and EMG for patients who are referred to our neurophysiology unit located at Tikur Anbessa Specialized Hospital.

Neurophysiology is one of my research priority areas in my future endeavours to develop neurosciences researches in Ethiopia. To this end, me and my colleagues at our department already prepared research proposal to analyze the electrodiagnostic tests we did until now, all EEG, NCS/EMG results.

Attending the neurophysiology fellowship training at Kasir Aniy Hospital in Cairo, had enhanced my knowledge and experience in neurophysiology and above all, created a smooth educational network for me with Cairo University Neurophysiology unit, especially Prof. Ann Abd-el-Kader, as I am still in contact with them and even consult them online on difficult cases I face in my daily practice. I am hopeful that IFCN will continue its support to our unit in expanding our services and in giving an opportunity to attend advanced neurophysiology training to make our unit future training centers for other African countries.

I have spent six months in Ibn Sina Hospital neurophysiology unit in Rabat, Morocco. The neurophysiology unit was a relatively high volume center with a dozen of specialists and subspecialists in the field. After the completion of my fellowship, I went back to my home country. I currently work in a national referral hospital in the capital Addis Ababa. It is the only hospital where neurology residency training is given. In collaboration with other young neurologists, we are running a neurophysiology unit which operates five days a week.

The IFCN scholarship has changed my practice in many aspects. I can perform more ancillary tests and able to interpret the results with confidence. My skills in routine tests have also enormously improved. My understanding of the basics science of neurophysiology has improved a lot which is an asset for my students and me. Even though our practice has been frequently interrupted by the shortage of consumable products like EMG needles, we are trying our best to deliver a service which is given only in a couple of public hospitals in Ethiopia.

In 2017, I did a ten months visiting research at the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre. Professor Matthew Kiernan is leading a clinical and research group of international reputation, which is focusing on clinical neurology, in particular, disease pathophysiology and treatment strategies of frontotemporal dementia and motor neuron disease (MND). During my visit, I learnt the Threshold-tracking Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TT-TMS) method to investigate cortical excitability in healthy and MND patients. I also participated in some related research projects and researched TMS parameters between Chinese and Caucasian subjects.

I still working on MND, particularly on Clinical Neurophysiology. Our institute has the largest EMG database of MND patients in China and has finished many types of research on this part. I prepare to investigate cortical excitability in Chinese MND patients and promote a promising collaboration between Chinese and Caucasian MND research groups comparing neurophysiology techniques and results. This visiting experience gave me a precious opportunity to learn from the world’s advanced research group and promote my research capacity.

I was in Lyon, Hospital Pierre Wertheimer, SEEG labour between 2015 September – 2016 March, and I was able to study the fundaments of SEEG technique with Dr. Jean Isnard.

In Hungary, in my alma mater, at the University of Pécs, we had already made the first SEEG monitor in February 2017. The patient is seizure free, and histology showed: FCD 1. Now, our EEG laboratory is becoming completely renewed, our new BQ, LTM 256 channels machine, is already in our building, waiting for the installation. Works will be finished in the first week of February. After then, we will start constant SEEG monitoring, and the next patient is a bitemporal case. There are no words to express my gratitude for IFCN to give access to our MR-negative epileptic patients and us, to provide them with hope to become seizure-free.

I am currently preparing a manuscript to report the findings of this multi-center study. IFCN fellowship award will be acknowledged in the paper. During this fellowship, I have built strong collaboration networks and have advanced my clinical investigation skills. This experience has laid a strong foundation for achieving my goals as a clinician-scholar. This project aimed to utilize an EEG data repository gathered from five major academic epilepsy centers involving 10 patients with Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP) and 40 matching living controls with focal to bilateral tonic-clonic seizures (FBTCS, also known as GTCS) captured on intracranial EEG with the goal of uncovering SUDEP risk markers and SUDEP mechanisms in drug-resistant epilepsy. The Institutional Review Board at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School approved the study with a waiver of informed consent due to the retrospective study. 69 patients aged 12-65 years who were studied with intracranial (depth and/or subdural) electrodes at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, New York University, Yale University, and George Washington University between 2005 and 2019.

I finished my clinical research on ALS in Brain and Mind Centre, The University of Sydney under the supervision of Prof Matthew C. Kiernan in March 2017.

From April 2017 until now, I am working as an assistant professor at the Department of Neurology, Graduate School of Medical Science, Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, Japan. The IFCN scholarship definitely helped me to get a position at the University in Japan.

I have continued my clinical research with my clinical and educational work. My clinical research topic is the exploration of neurophysiological biomarkers in Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease now. I want to plan a clinical trial in CMT in the future because our University hospital has a CMT specialized clinic.

During my IFCN scholarship period, I learned the Motor unit number index (MUNIX) technique and Human Induced Plutipotent Stem Cell (iPSC) culture, under the supervision of Prof. Susanne Petri. After I came back to China, I have been done some clinical physiological studies of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and peripheral diseases. I have used MUNIX to monitor the progression of disease in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. MUNIX proved to be a useful technique.

In 2015, as a young doctor who just finished the neurology residency training, I received a scholarship from IFCN to learn more about neurophysiology abroad. I chose Japan and learnt in Prof. Yoashikazu Ugawa’s laboratory which specializes neurophysiology in movement disorders, especially trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. Since working in Prof. Ugawa’s lab, I have been working and researching TMS. I wrote papers about TMS and planning to make my protocol of TMS for stimulating motor performance. Now I just finished my Ph.D. from the same lab in Japan, and I’m ready to go back to Indonesia. I can not wait to set up neurophysiology lab in the University of Indonesia with other colleagues. I am sure it will be the center of neurophysiology in Indonesia.