Brandy Fureman, PhD, was presented with the 2018 Distinguished Service Award during the American Epilepsy Society's recent annual meeting in New Orleans. AES is a medical and scientific society with 4,400 members.
Established in 1993, this award recognizes outstanding service by an AES member in the field of epilepsy with an emphasis on exemplary contributions to advancing the mission of the American Epilepsy Society and service to its members. The award includes a $1,000 honorarium.
Dr. Brandy Fureman is Vice President for Research and New Therapies at the Epilepsy Foundation. Her responsibilities include overall direction of all foundation new therapies grant and innovation programs, the Research Roundtable in Epilepsy, Epilepsy Pipeline conferences, and foundation activities to engage patients and families in the research process. She is a Principal Investigator of the Rare Epilepsy Network, the Epilepsy Learning Healthcare System, and the Human Epilepsy Project.
Previously, Dr. Fureman served with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) as a Program Director in the Channels, Synapses and Circuits cluster, overseeing a portfolio of basic, translational and clinical epilepsy research, including clinical trials. She was also responsible for identifying epilepsy research issues critical to NINDS and NIH and taking programmatic action through creation of focused funding opportunities such as the Epilepsy Centers Without Walls program, resource development, including the NINDS Common Data Elements for Epilepsy, Curing the Epilepsies conferences, and multiple workshops to address the needs in the field.
Dr. Fureman coordinated the Institute's Epilepsy Research Benchmarks strategic planning process in collaboration with the American Epilepsy Society. Dr. Fureman also worked as a Clinical Research Project Manager in the NINDS Clinical Trials Group, where she was responsible for overseeing the NINDS Clinical Research Collaboration Network and a number of Data and Safety Monitoring Boards for Phase III clinical trials.
Dr. Fureman was a Presidential Management Fellow at the NINDS, graduated from Cedar Crest College with a BS in Genetic Engineering Technology and received her PhD in Neuroscience from the Department of Neuroscience and Anatomy at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine. Her research interests focused on molecular and behavioral effects of ion channelopathy and triggers of dysfunction in episodic neurological disorders.