James O. McNamara, MD
Scientific Advisory Board
Jim is a Duke School of Medicine Professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Medicine (Neurology). He is the founder of the Duke Center for the Advanced Study of Epilepsy, the former director of the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center Epilepsy Center, and served as Chair of the Department of Neurobiology at Duke. His research focuses on the mechanisms of epileptogenesis, the process by which a normal brain becomes epileptic. A member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the American Epilepsy Society Research Recognition Award, Jim has received two National Institutes of Health Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Awards, an American Epilepsy Society Research Recognition Award, and a Freedom to Discover award from Bristol-Myers Squibb. Jim graduated from Marquette University and from the University of Michigan Medical School where he was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha. He served as chief resident in neurology and completed his postdoctoral work in neuroscience at Duke. He also completed a sabbatical year in the molecular neurobiology laboratory of Stephen Heinemann, Ph.D., at the Salk Institute in California.