Julia Jacobs-LeVan

Dr. Jacobs' Administrative Assistant is Rumi Dasgupta. She can be reached at: 

Phone: 403-955-2622

Skype: 587-794-3215

Fax: 403-955-7649

Email: Rumi.Dasgupta@ahs.ca

Dr. Jacobs is the Director of the Alberta Children’s Epilepsy Program. She is a physician scientist, who has been working with children that have epilepsy for more than 15 years. For the epilepsy program, Dr.  Jacobs aims to combine compassionate care for families with providing new treatment options and high-end research to understand mechanisms that lead to seizures.

Dr. Jacobs came to Calgary in 2019  to lead the pediatric epilepsy program and is an Associate Professor at the University of Calgary, Canada and Adjunct Professor at the University of  Freiburg, Germany. Prior to joining the team in Calgary, she has been the interim director of the Department of Pediatric Neurology and Muscular Disease at the University Medical Center Freiburg and the Head of the Pediatric Epilepsy Program. Dr. Jacobs has had a close and longstanding relationship to Canada as she received her epilepsy training at the Montreal Neurological Institute at Mc Gill University.

Dr. Jacobs aims to provide personalized treatment and care for children affected by seizures and all types of epilepsy. She has a special focus on helping families with difficult to control, refractory seizures. Dr. Jacobs is involved in clinical trials of new anti-seizure treatments, including specialized treatments for rare genetic epilepsies and cannabidiol (CBD). She is also an expert in evaluating children for epilepsy surgery. A more recently developed interest is in the early identification of children that are at risk of developing epilepsy after a first seizure or traumatic brain injury. The aim of this clinic is to prevent the development of epilepsy.

Dr. Jacobs is an Associate Professor at the University affiliated with the Department of Pediatrics and Clinical Neurosciences. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the University for Freiburg, Germany.

In Germany, she leads the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Group together with Dr. Alexandra Klotz. More information can be found here.

Dr. Jacobs is a member of the Alberta Children’s Research Institute and the Hotchkiss Brain Institute. Her research focusses on advanced analysis of EEGs for children with seizures or at risk of developing epilepsy. She also works on developing new methods for the analysis of intracranial EEG and fMRI data.

As a clinician scientist, Dr. Jacobs has also conducted numerous clinical studies, ranging for placebo-controlled trials to survey studies, all with a focus on improving care for families affected by epilepsy.

Dr. Jacobs’ research develops new diagnostic tools for epilepsy.  One focus is the analysis of High Frequency Oscillations (HFOs) using intracranial and scalp EEG. The second focus is the analysis of simultaneous EEG and functional MRI (fMRI) recordings to identify epileptic networks. In epilepsy, providing a prognosis can be challenging, thus these newly developed tools allow to predict outcome in children with early epileptic encephalopathies and  undergoing epilepsy surgery.

If you are interested in the lab or the Alberta Children’s Epilepsy Program as a researcher, please contact: julia.jacobslevan@ucalgary.ca

Dr. Jacobs has been engaged in the research community for more than 10 years. She works as an Associate Editor for “Epilepsia” and “Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology”. As an active member of the Canadian League against Epilepsy and American Epilepsy Society, she serves on several committees aiming to improve research exchange and clinical care. Together with other pediatric epilepologists of the Canadian Pediatric Epilepsy Network (CPEN) she founded the Canadian Pediatric Stereo-EEG group.

Dr Jacobs serves on the medical advisory board of Hope for Hypothalamic Harmatomas and is a Director on the Board of the Epilepsy Association of Calgary.

You can follow Dr. Jacobs and the Knowledge2Empower Program @excitedbrains on Instagram and Twitter.