Sloka Iyengar, PhD

Sloka Iyengar PhD, PMP, grew up in India, where she had the amazing opportunity of working as an administrator at a shelter for stray animals. This is where she started wondering how animals (and humans) regulate temperature, feel hunger, and what might kick off maternal behavior.

These ideas led her to pursue her doctoral work in neuroscience. At the University of South Carolina, she used a technique called electrophysiology to better understand epilepsy circuits. As a postdoctoral fellow in New York, she studied the role of postnatal neurogenesis (the birth of neurons in the adult brain) in the hippocampus. After this, she worked as a clinical researcher at the Northeast Regional Epilepsy Group, where she facilitated clinical trials for adults and children with epilepsy and set up projects to understand the mechanisms involved in brain tumor-related epilepsy. She has advocated for increased funding for epilepsy research in Washington, D.C., and is involved in epilepsy-related projects in India.

Dr. Iyengar currently works as an associate medical director at a medical communication agency in New York, where she works with pharmaceutical companies to develop content for education and stakeholder engagement. In her non-science time, she is a professional dancer and an avid swimmer. Her goal as the basic science editor for epilepsy.com is to bring cutting-edge research in the field of epilepsy to you.

Reach out to Dr. Iyengar at www.slokaiyengar.com if there is a topic that interests you and you want to know more about it.