Meet our Staff

Introducing the neurology and neurophysiology administrative team. They are the ones you will often encounter first in the clinic. They greet you at the front desks, answer your calls, and schedule appointments. They are always here to help our families as they are our top priority!

“Certified Child Life Specialists are educated and clinically trained in the developmental impact of illness and injury. Their role helps improve patient and family care, satisfaction, and overall experience.” – Association of Child Life Specialists (www.childlife.org)  

In a nutshell, Child Life Specialists help children and families understand and cope with their healthcare experiences.  Within her role, she supports patients coming in for various procedures, such as EEGs, MRIs, CTs, lab work, ECHOs and ECGs, through preparation sessions, parent coaching and support, and the development of coping plans.  She also provides education and resources to families for such areas as medication compliance, pill swallowing techniques, needle anxiety and general anxiety, and recovery from past negative medical experiences, all in order to reduce potential trauma and support overall development of the child.

The Education Consultant for the Neuroscience Clinics consults with parents, teachers, and interdisciplinary team members regarding a student’s educational needs and the impact of the child’s health condition on their needs; provide recommendations for support, strategies, or accommodations to support a child’s successful attendance at school; participates in inter-disciplinary team meetings; and acts as a resource person for educational issues for students with complex needs to parents and teachers.

Rachna and Lindsay are the Registered Dietitians that are part of the NMT (Neuro-Metabolic Therapy) program at the Alberta Children’s Hospital. Their role is to teach and provide support to families whose children are following a ketogenic diet. The ketogenic diet is primarily used to treat children with epilepsy who have refractory seizures and have failed multiple medications. However, the ketogenic diet is also implemented for children who are enrolled in the autism study.

Curtis Claassen is a pharmacist who has been practicing for 30+ years and has been working with our neurology clinic and epilepsy multidisciplinary team for the last 20 years.  The 20 years he has spent in neurology have been his favourite of the 30.  He feels privileged to assist our team of physicians, nurses and allied healthcare providers in all things related to medications which includes assessing for drug interactions and drug adverse effects, procuring anti-seizure medications not readily available in Canada and helping with medication coverage.

Email: Rumi.Dasgupta@albertahealthservices.ca

Phone: 403-955-2296

Rumi is Dr. Jacobs' Administrative Assistant. She is a toxicologist who worked in both basic and clinical research in UK and India before moving to Canada. She has been supporting Dr. Jacobs-LeVan since the time she joined the Alberta Children’s Hospital, and now she has also joined her research team. Her interest lies in the field of neurology and research is her passion.

Email: Ransi.Nayakarathna@albertahealthservices.ca

As a study coordinator at the Alberta Children’s Epilepsy program, Ransi currently supports clinical research coordination of Takeda 3001 for Dravet Syndrome patients, Takeda 3002 for LGS patients, and Candid for CDKL5 patient studies.

Previously, Ransi worked as a Research Coordinator at the University of Calgary, a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Lethbridge and a research Associate at Medlior Health Inc. Ransi received her MD from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, and MSc in Public health from the University of Lethbridge, Canada.

Currently coordinating the following studies:

Anavex for Rett Syndrome Patients

Takeda for Dravet Syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut Patients

Candid for CDKL5 Patients

Daniel obtained his Ph.D. in Biomedical Signal Processing from the University of Freiburg, Germany, a M.Sc. in Electronic Implants from the University of Bern, Switzerland and a B.Sc. in Clinical Engineering from the Universidad Latina de Costa Rica.  He started his professional career in 2009 as a clinical engineer in Costa Rica and shortly thereafter obtained the ESKAS excellence scholarship from the Swiss government. After completing his Master's degree he worked for 3 years in Switzerland and Germany as an embedded software engineer, developing a wireless, energy self-sufficient, smart embedded system to monitor the frequency of hand-disinfections across hospitals and the correlation with nosocomial infections. After concluding this project, he moved to Freiburg to start his research career and focus on the processing of electrophysiological signals.

His research focuses on the analysis of intracranial and scalp electro-encephalogram signals (EEG). He has gathered a vast experience developing software algorithms, GUIs, statistical analyses and data visualization using Python, MATLAB and C++.  The software packages that he has developed are publicly available and provide a user-friendly front-end for neurologists to explore their hypotheses while relying on a back-end that runs state of the art signal-processing and machine-learning algorithms. He has personally used these tools to confirm or reject the epileptic nature of high-frequency-oscillations (HFO), a novel EEG biomarker; this was achieved by measuring the degree of temporal and spatial coincidence between HFO and established epileptic and physiologic neuronal events.

He has also conducted and published studies using the differentiated HFO to localize the epileptic focus, predict the occurrence of seizures, form connectivity networks, predict memory-deficits, analyse the efficacy of anti-epileptic medication and characterize cortico-cortical evoked potentials.He is currently a research associate at the University of Calgary working together with the group of Dr. Julia Jacobs to unravel the potential of scalp HFO as epilepsy biomarkers in paediatric patients.

Dr. Margarita Maltseva is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute as well as the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary. She is also a scholarship holder of the Walter-Benjamin-Scholarship founded by the German Research Foundation. Her current research is focused on analyzing high frequency oscillations. In addition to that, she has background in research about quality of life, caregiver burden, rescue medication and sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. Accomplishing one year of neurology residency in Germany and working not only with adult patients but also with children, as well as her activities as a youth board and teaching children, inspired her to engage into pediatric neurology research. It is her final goal to become a physician scientist specialized in epileptology. Dr. Maltseva is also engaged into the Postdoctoral Fellows Association of the University of Calgary and has been recently elected as Vice President Communications.

Riddhi Chabrotra is currently a master’s student in Dr. Jacobs’ lab. She has previous research experience in a pathology lab working with osteosarcoma, an animal biosciences lab investigating fertility, and has worked in a lab investigating the COVID-19 vaccine immunogenicity. She is now excited to explore her research project in pediatric neurology, specifically measuring brain maturation in children using high-frequency oscillations and their networks.

Sonia is in her second year at the University of Calgary, studying Visual Arts and Art History with a minor in Biological Sciences. She graduated from high school with an 'Excellence in Art' award and was enrolled in the advanced art program for all three years. She joined the team as a summer research student in 2023, helping build the K2E platform by working on animations and images for the videos within the program.

Faryal Tariq is finishing school at William Aberhart High School. She has a passion for the arts, as well as is determined to experiment with new media. She volunteered at the YMCA as a youth basketball coach and founded the organisation ArtAid4All - which made handmade items to sell in order to fundraise for charity. She worked with Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Meza Santoscoy as a summer research student, then was employed by them in order to make animations and games. She created escape rooms and other various mini-games for our K2E platform, in order for the kids to learn about epilepsy.