Background

I am a clinician with strong expertise in epilepsy research, including intracranial recordings, microelectrodes analyses and epilepsy-sleep interaction.
I hold a PhD in neuroscience (Lemanic Neuroscience Doctoral School, Geneva and Lausanne) and achieved a 3-year post-doctoral fellowship at University College London with Prof. Matthew Walker.

I am board-certified in Clinical Neurology (Geneva University Hospitals, Switzerland), with a subspecialty in EEG and Epileptology, and also trained in Sleep Medicine.
Past and current successful applications for research grants include Swiss National Science Foundation (MD-PhD, postdoc.mobility and Ambizione schemes), Marie-Curie postdoctoral grant from the EU, Guarantors of Brain and local grant from the University Hospitals of Geneva.
I am also Associate Editor at Brain Communications handling papers on neurophysiology, epilepsy, and sleep.

Projects at Prof. Vulliémoz’s group

Together with Prof. Vulliémoz, we have been working on epileptic network and intersection between epilepsy and sleep. We have shown that interictal epileptiform discharges occur during a vulnerable period of slow oscillatory activity (Sheybani et al., 2021, Epilepsia). Subsequently, we demonstrated that sleep entities, such as sleep spindles, are asymmetrical in people with focal epilepsy and we were able to classify left vs right hemispheric epilepsy using only sleep entities (Sheybani et al., 2023, Brain Communications).

Current projects

I successfully applied for an Ambizione grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, which allowed me to start my own research projects with a post-doctoral fellow and a PhD student. My projects are hosted at Prof. Serge Vulliémoz and Prof. Anita Lüthi’s laboratories (University of Lausanne, Switzerland). I aim to further investigate how sleep entities modulate the risk of epileptic activities and how we can leverage this knowledge to improve control of epilepsy.