Phillip L. Pearl

Dr. Pearl serves as an expert for the Department of Neurology for Boston Children's Hospital Precision Medicine Service. For more information about the Precision Medicine Service please visit bostonchildrens.org/precisionmed.

My clinical expertise is in metabolic causes of childhood epilepsies, a group of rare diseases in great need of understanding and therapies.

My work in metabolic epilepsies began with a combined interest in childhood epilepsy and neurochemistry and a series of patients with undiagnosed disorders in whom we began to establish diagnoses, some of which were treatable. My initial foray in this group of disorders was in the neurotransmitter diseases.

As I attended meetings of the metabolic societies, giving presentations on these diseases, I noticed there was very little discussion of the actual clinical presentations of the patients or the challenges a clinician faces when seeing a child with unexplained seizures. At the same time, during meetings of the epilepsy societies, discussions about seizures and their treatments virtually ignored these enigmatic diseases known to a small group of metabolism experts but with potentially profound impact on children being followed for epilepsy. This struck me as a significant void affecting our patients, and I ultimately pursued further studies and work in this combined area of metabolic epilepsy.

I was formerly the chief of the neurology division at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. and professor of pediatrics, neurology and music at George Washington University. I completed medical school at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, residencies in pediatrics and pediatric neurology at Baylor College of Medicine and a fellowship in clinical neurophysiology at Boston Children's Hospital.

In 2014, I became the director of epilepsy and clinical neurophysiology at Boston Children's Hospital and the William G. Lennox Chair and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. While it was difficult to leave the people and place where my career became established, I had completed my training at Boston Children's Hospital and coming back to lead the division where I trained was an honor and in some ways a homecoming.

Since coming to Boston Children's, I have helped to build up the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit, to reorganize the division into clinical and academic programs and to launch new programs such as ICU-EEG monitoring and international epilepsy. I have also devoted much of my career to neurologic education, including curricular development on a national and international basis, directing a program in telemedicine and serving as president of the Professors of Child Neurology from 2012 to 2014.