Donald L Schomer

Donald L Schomer, MD, is a Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Having joined the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in 1980, he is now the Director of their Clinical Neurophysiology Laboratory and Chief of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Program. After graduating from the University of Michigan Medical School, he trained in Internal Medicine through Columbia University at the Cooperstown, New York facility, followed by Neurology and Clinical Neurophysiology at McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute where he trained with Wilder Penfield, MD, Pierre Gloor, MD, PhD, Herbert Jasper, MD, PhD, and Frederic Andermann, MD. Dr Schomer’s professional career has focused on central neurophysiology and on the treatment of patients with difficult-to-control epilepsy. As the founder of the Epilepsy Program at BIDMC, he has seen the program evolve into one of the largest dedicated programs for adults with epilepsy in New England. Furthermore, he served as one of the founding members of the NAEC (National Association of Epilepsy Centers), in addition to developing a Fellowship in Clinical Neurophysiology and Epilepsy in 1984. Having trained many current senior clinicians in this country and abroad, he can count among his trainees Departmental Chiefs and Divisional Chiefs at Washington University, Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Emory University, Brown University, Tufts University, Wayne State University, University of Massachusetts, UC Davis, University of Calgary, and Harvard, as well as those at institutes as far afield as Switzerland, Zambia, and Brazil. Dr Schomer has also presided over the boards of the two societies that relate to the field of central clinical neurophysiology, as well as serving a decade as the Chairman of the Board of Clinical Neurophysiology, the oldest professional testing organization in the US. He is part of a select seven-member international oversight committee for Diagnostic Methods for the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE). Having also spent much time on numerous editorial boards, he is now an Associate Editor for the Annals of Neurology and is the Editor, alongside Fernando Lopes da Silva, MD, PhD, for the seventh edition of the Niedermeyer Textbook of Clinical Neurophysiology and Related Fields which will be published by Oxford Press in 2016.