Pediatric Neurology

The Child Neurology program is academically affiliated to the neurology department, but is housed at the Children's Hospital  of Michigan - the only free standing children's institute in the state. It is a 228 bed tertiary care facility devoted to providing comprehensive care to newborns, infants and children below the age of 18 years.

The pediatric neurology clinics provide outpatient evaluation of children in multiple locations - Detroit, Dearborn, Canton, Southfield, Troy and Clinton Township. Our services focus on a wide range of neurological issues such as head injury, seizures, developmental delay, concussion, intractable epilepsy and muscular dystrophies. Specialty clinics include epilepsy, neurogenetics, autism center and MDA clinic encompassing spinal muscular atrophy, myopathies, peripheral neuropathies and dystrophies. Most specialty clinics are multidisciplinary and include the input of genetics counselors, specially trained nurses, dieticians and social workers. The MDA clinic includes physical and occupational therapists as well. Children's imaging facilities include three tesla magnet MRIs, a pediatric PET scanner and stae of the art software that can be applied to imaging. Children's Hospital of Michigan has a tertiary care pediatric intensive care unit, a neonatal intensive care unit, and level one pediatric emergency and trauma care center.

The Pediatric Neurology department has 10 full time faculty, seven pediatric neurology residents, two epilepsy fellows, one nurse practitioners and four neurology trained RNs in addition to the dietician, genetics counselor and epilepsy surgery faculty. We have close ties with the department of neurosurgery and rehabilitative medicine and hold multidisciplinary meetings to discuss complex cases. The division evaluates about 15,000 children per year- by far the largest of any division in Michigan. The faculty is very invested in teaching and mentoring of residents and each resident is assigned a faculty advisor. Dr. Lalitha Sivaswamy is the division Chief and Dr. Mitchell Williams is the program director. Jacqueline Taylor is the residency coordinator, and Mr. James T. Dunn is the Department Director and oversees administrative operations.

The division is very active in terms of research and has members that collectively have 6 NIH grants, multiple pharmaceutical grants and several active clinical trials in epilepsy, developmental delay, Sturge-Weber syndrome and headache. Each resident has about 2-3 papers that have been published or accepted for publication prior to their graduation.  Most residents go on to pursue further training in a sub-specialty such as pain, movement disorder or epilepsy and graduates have gone on to become program directors, fellowship directors and highly accomplished faculty at institutions in the United States and abroad.