Dr. Birgit Frauscher is an Austrian neurologist specializing in epilepsy and sleep medicine, who is an attending epileptologist and Associate Professor of Neurology at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, McGill University. She did her medical training, residency and subspecialisation at Innsbruck Medical University, and obtained her board certification in neurology in 2008. Dr. Frauscher has diplomas in EEG, EMG/NCV, and sleep. From 2013 to 2015, she was awarded a two-year Schrödinger fellowship to spend a visiting professorship at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, McGill University to specialize on intracranial EEG. Her clinical interest is in the management of people with therapy-refractory epilepsy, the interpretation of EEG including EMU, intracranial EEG, and polysomnography, and the differential diagnosis between sleep-related hypermotor epilepsy and parasomnias.
Dr. Frauscher’s research interest is in the development of novel seizure-independent EEG markers for the epileptogenic zone in order to achieve a more accurate diagnosis of epilepsy, and the investigation of the important interactions between sleep and epilepsy. She also researches the use of invasive intracranial EEG to study brain physiology during wakefulness and sleep in order to better delineate normal from abnormal intracranial EEG activity. She is the author of more than 130 peer-reviewed papers in the field of epilepsy and sleep. Her research was awarded with the European Young Investigator Award of the International League Against Epilepsy in 2018 and the Ernst-Nidermeyer Prize of the Austrian Epilepsy Society in 2015.
