Description:

Mary Lou Smith, PhD, is a clinical neuropsychologist at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto, Canada. Over the past several years, her major area of research has been on the cognitive and behavioural co-morbidities associated with epilepsy. Her studies have involved individuals with intractable seizures with onset in childhood and have addressed four major areas: quality of life, surgical outcome, plasticity of language representation, and memory.

She is one of few neuroscientists who are longitudinally following children with epilepsy treated with surgical or medication, children with high functioning autism, and children born preterm. Many of these studies involve examining the cognitive, academic, social, emotional, and behavioral effects of these disorders and the evaluation of their structural and functional neuroimaging correlates. She has particular interest in the long-term effects of surgery on children and its outcomes in young adulthood.