Philippe Ryvlin

Philippe Ryvlin is a neurologist and epilepsy researcher. He is a professor of neurology at the University of Lausanne and an affiliated professor at the University of Copenhagen. He has headed the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) since 1 January 2015. His research concerns epilepsy surgery, sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP), intracerebral electroencephalography (EEG), and wearable seizure detection. He is co-editor-in-chief, with Peter Goadsby, of Current Opinion in Neurology.

Education and career

Ryvlin studied medicine in Paris from 1981 to 1987 and completed a neurology residency in Lyon from 1988 to 1994. He earned a master's degree in statistics and epidemiology in 1989 and a second master's degree in genetics and cytogenetics in 1993. From 1990 to 1991, he completed epilepsy fellowships at the Montreal Neurological Institute, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Zurich University Hospital. He received an MD and completed his specialist training in neurology in 1994, and completed a PhD in neuroscience in 1997.

He was a professor of neurology at Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 from 2000 to 2014. At the Hospices Civils de Lyon, he helped develop the epilepsy surgery programme and headed the Department of Functional Neurology and Epileptology in 2013–2014. In a 2011 meta-analysis of 112 placebo-controlled trials of adjunctive antiepileptic drugs in refractory epilepsy, Ryvlin, Michel Cucherat and Sylvain Rheims found that definite or probable SUDEP was significantly less frequent among patients receiving efficacious drug doses than among those receiving placebo.

Ryvlin was the first author of the MORTEMUS study, published in The Lancet Neurology in 2013. It retrospectively surveyed cardiorespiratory arrests reported by epilepsy monitoring units in Europe, Israel, Australia and New Zealand in 2008–2009. a cloud-based collaborative environment in which epilepsy centres can share data and analyse intracerebral EEG recordings using common software tools.

Editorial work and awards

Ryvlin is co-editor-in-chief, with Peter Goadsby, of Current Opinion in Neurology, and was one of the founders of the journal Epileptic Disorders. In 2015, the International League Against Epilepsy presented him with its Ambassador for Epilepsy Award, which recognises outstanding international contributions to activities advancing the cause of epilepsy.