Daniel H. Lowenstein is an American neurologist who is the Robert B. and Ellinor Aird Professor of Neurology and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
In this role, Lowenstein leads UCSF's research enterprise and academic program, consisting of four professional schools and a Graduate Division.
[citation needed] In 2015 Lowenstein received the Chancellor”s Diversity Award for Disability Service as result of his efforts to remove the stigma associated with mental illness among health professions students.
Important findings by his team included the observation of selective neuronal loss in the setting of traumatic brain injury, the discovery that seizure activity in an adult model of temporal lobe epilepsy causes a marked increase in the birth of hippocampal neurons (with post-doc Jack Parent), and the recognition that numerous molecules responsible for normal development are also expressed in this same brain region in the adult.
[citation needed] In 2002, Lowenstein turned his attention toward questions related to the genetic basis of common forms of human epilepsy.
[citation needed] The first major findings of the collaborative effort between EPGP and Epi4K, which demonstrated the role of de novo mutations as the cause of many patients with epileptic encephalopathy, appeared in a 2013 issue of Nature.
Numerous findings have since been published based on the combined work of EPGP and Epi4K, including a paper in Lancet Neurology describing the role of ultra-rare variants in the common epilepsies.
In the 1990s, he was the Principal Investigator of a prospective, multi-centered, NINDS-sponsored clinical trial looking at the potential benefits of active treatment of patients in status epilepticus in the pre-hospital setting.
[citation needed] While chairing the UCSF “Blue Sky” Curriculum Design Task Force in the late 1990s, Lowenstein is credited for coming up with the idea of “The Academy”, a new approach for supporting the teaching mission of medical schools.