Birgit Frauscher is an Austrian neurologist specialized in electrophysiology of 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 in Austria. She obtained her board certification in neurology in 2008 and has diplomas in EEG, EMG/NCV, and sleep. She completed her habilitation on the neurophysiological characterization of REM sleep behavior disorder in 2011. From 2013 – 2015, she was awarded a two-year Schroedinger 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 i) the management of people with therapy-refractory epilepsy, ii) the interpretation of EEG including EMU, intracranial EEG, and polysomnography, and iii) the differential diagnosis between sleep-related hypermotor epilepsy and parasomnias. Her research interest is in i) the development of novel seizure-independent EEG markers for the epileptogenic zone in order to achieve a more accurate diagnosis of epilepsy, ii) the investigation of the important interactions between sleep and epilepsy, and iii) the use of the unique possibility of invasive intracranial EEG for studying 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 has been awarded with a Junior 2 Clinician-Scientist award of the FRSQ 2018-2021, the Young Investigator award of the International League against Epilepsy / European Chapter 2018 and the Ernst Niedermeyer prize of the Austrian Epilepsy Society in 2015.