Education

B.S., General Science, Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA, 2001
B.S., Electrical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 2001
M.S., Electrical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 2002
Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 2007
3rd year FIRST Postdoctoral Fellow, 2007 - present

Research Statement

Along with John Rolston, Neal Laxpati, Li Su, Claire-Anne Gutekunst, and Robert Gross, I am investigating the efficacy of electrical or optical stimulation of the brain in a rodent model of human epilspsy.  More than 1 million people in the U.S. alone suffer from chronic epileptic seizures despite prescribed medical therapies. Only a minority of these patients are candidates for surgical treatment which, while potentially curative in many cases, presents risks of further disability.  Moreover, such surgery is not always successful, and many times is inadvisable if the epileptic region lies in a critical area, such as an area of the brain that is responsible for controlling speech since removal of this area of brain would impair speech while not guaranteeing a cure for seizures. Thus, there is a great need for novel, minimal risk approaches that can stop or reduce seizures in epilepsy patients for whom there are no other therapeutic options. In our protocols, we aim to develop a new but minimal risk therapy for patients with epilepsy.  We explore and control the parameters for stimulating the brain of epileptic rats--rats in which we induce epilepsy via a toxin--to reduce ictal and interictal pathological activity.  Ultimately, by understanding these parameters in the rat, we aim to successfully translate such knowledge into human patients with the same disease.

Recent Publications

Darbin, O., Smart, O., Wichmann, T.  (2008)   A non-invasive technique to monitor wakefulness during electrophysiologic recording experiments in primates. J Neurosci Methods.177(2):448-51

Smart, O., Firpi, H., and Vachtsevanos, G. (2007) Genetic programming of conventional features to detect seizure precursors. In: Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, vol. 20, pp. 1070–1085.

Firpi, H., Smart, O., Worrell, G., Marsh, E., Dlugos, D., Litt, B. (2007) High-frequency oscillations detected in epileptic networks using swarmed neural-network features. Ann Biomed Eng. 35:1573-1584.

Emory University School of Medicine
Department of Neurosurgery
Atlanta, GA 30322
Email: osmart@emory.edu