UCI researcher wins award

American Epilepsy Society gives its top prize, $10,000 to the medical school’s Tallie Z. Baram.Like so many award-winning scientists, Tallie Z. Baram started her career with a nagging question.

When the Israeli-born doctor was an intern at the Baylor College of Medicine in the 1980s, she was once part of a team treating an infant who had been suffering from epileptic spasms. The chief physician handed Baram a syringe and told her to inject the child with it.

“I asked him what was in the syringe and why I was supposed to inject it, and he said the syringe contained ACTH, which is a type of hormone,” Baram said. “I asked, ‘Why do I give this to a baby with epilepsy?’ He said, ‘Because it works.’ I asked why, and he didn’t know the answer.

“So I think this is one of the moments that inspired me to find out what happens in the brains of children when they have a seizure.”

That inquisitiveness has paid off for Baram. This week, the Newport Beach resident became the first UC Irvine professor -- and the first woman -- ever to win the American Epilepsy Society’s top research award.

On Monday, Baram was one of two recipients of the Epilepsy Research Recognition Award to be honored in Washington, D.C. She and the other winner, Jean Gotman of McGill University, each received $10,000 for their efforts in seeking treatments and cures for epilepsy.

Baram said the money was intended for pleasure, not work, but she would pump it into her research anyway. Although her work on epilepsy is nationally renowned, Baram still dedicates her life to seeking cures to what she describes as a misunderstood condition.

“It’s one of the closet diseases,” Baram said. “People with Parkinson’s came out when Michael J. Fox said he had it. Alzheimer’s became appropriate to have when Ronald Reagan had it. But people still hide epilepsy. It still has a major stigma.”

Epilepsy is a neurological condition that causes people to have unprovoked seizures, some of which are more detectable than others. While some sufferers of epilepsy are prone to falling or thrashing with their limbs, others merely experience loss of consciousness or repeat certain actions unknowingly.

Most of Baram’s research has centered around the effects of seizures on children and how they lead to epilepsy later in life. Her ultimate goal is to use her research to design drugs for treating epilepsy during the formative years.

Baram earned her doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, before receiving her medical degree at the University of Miami in 1980. She has been a professor in UCI’s School of Medicine since 1995 and holds an endowed chair in neurological sciences. In 2002, she founded the UCI Epilepsy Research Center.