Christos Papadelis

Christos Papadelis is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Head of the Children’s Brain Dynamics laboratory in the Division of Newborn Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr. Papadelis has more than ten years of experience in magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) technology with both adults and children. He received the Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1998, and his MSc and PhD in Medical Informatics, in 2001 and 2005 respectively, from the same institute. After his PhD graduation, he worked as Post-Doc Researcher in the Brain Science Institute (BSI) of RIKEN, Japan, from 2005 to 2008, and in the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC) of University of Trento, Italy, from 2008 to 2011. Back in 2011, he moved to Boston to join the Fetal-Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center (FNNDSC) as Instructor in Neurology and Manager of the BabyMEG facility, one of the very few MEG laboratories in the world fully dedicated to pediatric research.

His research covers a broad range of studies on neuroscience, clinical neurophysiology, and biomedical engineering. Dr. Papadelis has a record of productive research projects leading to more than 40 peer-reviewed research investigation articles and numerous articles in conference proceedings. He has funded projects from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the American Epilepsy Society, the Faculty Development Office at Harvard Medical School, and the Boston Children's Hospital. He is Academic Editor in PLOS ONE, ad-hoc reviewer in more than 40 journals, as well as guest editor in special issues of his field. Figures of his work have been selected as covers in scientific journals.

His main research activities include:

• Presurgical Mapping in Childhood Epilepsy:A large proportion of pediatric epileptic patients become medically intractable and require resective surgery. To be successful, epilepsy surgery requires a comprehensive preoperative evaluation for defining the epileptogenic zone. A battery of presurgical diagnostic tests is used to assess the epileptogenic zone. However, the results of these tests are often insufficiently concordant or inconclusive. Dr. Papadelis works on the development of a non-invasively acquired robust biomarker that identifies the epileptogenic zone and eventually improves the outcome of surgical treatment in pediatric patients with epilepsy.
  
• Anatomical and Functional Deficits in the Brain of Children with Cerebral Palsy:虽然脑瘫是最常见的causes of physical disability in early childhood, we know little about the functional and structural changes of this disorder in the developing brain. Dr. Papadelis investigates with different neuroimaging modalities whether spastic cerebral palsy is associated with functional and anatomical abnormalities in the sensorimotor network. This research has important implications for the diagnosis and the rehabilitation of patients with spastic cerebral palsy. Such interventions should be applied early in life when the brain demonstrates the ability to plasticity, allowing it to readily reorganize in the face of injury.
  
• Involvement of Cerebellum in the Processing of Emotions:Despite findings that a wide variety of psychiatric disorders have been associated with abnormalities in the cerebellum, this brain structure is often overlooked as a contributor to the neural basis of emotion. Dr. Papadelis’ goal is to examine the functional role of cerebellum in the processing of emotional stimuli. This kind of knowledge could aid in the development of novel therapies to detect and treat early manifestations of psychiatric disorders, such as those affecting mood and anxiety.