Alexander Rotenberg

Alexander Rotenberg, M.D., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Neurology
Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School

Education History:
B.A., Johns Hopkins
M.D., PhD, State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center

Alexander Rotenberg, M.D., Ph.D. is a practicing neurologist and epileptologist at Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, where he heads the transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) service within the department of Neurology. He received his undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University and combined graduate degrees from State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center, before completing the residency in Child Neurology and fellowship in Epilepsy and Clinical Neurophysiology at Children’s Hospital. Dr. Rotenberg leads local efforts to adapt methods for TMS and other forms of noninvasive brain stimulation to the pediatric population, particularly to children with epilepsy. He also heads a basic science laboratory where experiments focus on translational applications of noninvasive brain stimulation in animal models of epilepsy and brain injury.

In the basic science laboratory, Dr. Rotenberg and his staff have developed novel methods for TMS and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in vivo in rodents and in vitro in isolated brain slice preparations. TMS and tDCS have in common the capacity to safely induce durable changes in neuronal activity. Limited experience with human patients, including those treated at Children's Hospital and the Berenson-Allen Center, show that TMS and tDCS have realistic prospects for suppressing seizures. Yet TMS and tDCS mechanisms of action are incompletely understood, and whether these techniques can prevent the onset of epilepsy after various forms of brain injury has not been tested. To characterize the cellular mechanisms by which TMS and tDCS exert their effect, and ultimately to optimize their clinical efficacy, Dr. Rotenberg’s laboratory studies them in rat epilepsy models, including models of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post-traumatic epilepsy. Also, to determine how best to match noninvasive brain stimulation mechanisms to those of brain injury and epilepsy, his laboratory studies the molecular changes associated with TBI in rats.

In parallel to Dr. Rotenberg’s basic science experiments, he and his staff are enrolling subjects into ongoing clinical trials aimed to further develop techniques for noninvasive brain stimulation, particularly TMS, as diagnostic and therapeutic tools in child neurology.

Children’s Hospital website: http://childrenshospital.org/cfapps/research/data_admin/Site2825/mainpageS2825P0.html

Dr Rotenberg's talk at the ICNC2014 is title "TMS in Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy"