CO-FOUNDERS and officers

Sotirios Keros MD PhD

President and Treasurer, KCIAF

Former Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, Weill Cornell Medical College
Adjunct Associate Professor in Pediatrics, University of South Dakota

Dr. Keros is a pediatric neurologist and epilepsy specialist who has 20 years of clinical experience in treating seizures and movement disorders. Dr. Keros studied both Biomedical and Electrical Engineering at Duke university, and has a basic science background which includes a PhD in the neurosciences from the University of Alabama-Birmingham where he researched mechanisms related to epilepsy. He also obtained his MD from the University of Alabama through an NIH-funded scholarship (the Medical Scientist Training Program). He then spent 10 years at Weill Cornell Medical College as a trainee and later as faculty where he continued his laboratory research on treatments for epilepsy in both animal models and human stem cell systems. Five years ago he moved his clinical practice to Sanford Children's Hospital in Sioux Falls South Dakota in order to provide epilepsy care to children in an area of the country with a drastic shortage of child neurologists. It was in South Dakota that he met his first patient with a KCNMA1 channelopathy. His combined background in neurology and ion channel physiology was perfectly suited for helping children with this condition, and it spurred him to begin research collaborations and to establish KCIAF.org. Dr. Keros returned to Weill Cornell in New York City in 2020 before retiring from clinical medicine in 2022.

More information about Dr. Keros can be found at www.sotirioskeros.com/about

Andrea Meredith PhD

Vice-President and Secretary, KCIAF

Professor of Physiology and Program in Neuroscience, University of Maryland School of Medicine

Dr. Meredith received her doctoral degree in Neuroscience from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. She performed her postdoctoral training as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Fellow at Stanford University, where she began her studies of the ‘Big K+’ (BK) potassium ion channel encoded by the KCNMA1 gene, in the lab of Dr. Richard Aldrich, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2006, Dr. Meredith established her lab at The University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, where her research focuses on the molecular and biophysical mechanisms that regulate BK channel activity in neurological and neuromuscular function. Dr. Meredith is widely recognized for her work on the physiological roles for the BK channel, pioneering transgenic animal models that include both loss-of-function and gain-of-function mutations in the KCNMA1 gene.

Dr. Meredith has authored over 45 peer-reviewed publications. Her research is currently funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and The S&R Foundation. She is a standing member of the Neurotransporters, Receptors, Channels and Calcium Signaling (NTRC) NIH Study Section, Councilor of the Society of General Physiologists, and Editorial Advisory Board Member of the Journal of General Physiology and the Biophysical Society/Institute of Physics. Dr. Meredith is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2008 Maryland Outstanding Young Scientist Award and Allan C. Davis medal (The Maryland Science Center), a 2009 Scientist Development Award from the American Heart Association, the 2011 S&R Foundation Ryuji Ueno Award for Ion Channels Research (The American Physiological Society), and the 2017 Society of Physiologists Lecturer (Membrane Biophysics Subgroup of the Biophysical Society).

More information on Dr. Meredith and her research program can be found at meredithlab.org

BOARD MEMBERS

Dr. Michael Kruer received his medical degree from the University of Arizona College of Medicine. He trained in Pediatrics at Phoenix Children’s Hospital and in pediatric neurology and developmental medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). He also trained in laboratory-based molecular genetics while at OHSU. Dr. Kruer founded his laboratory in 2011, which focuses on molecular & cellular mechanisms of childhood movement disorders. During this time he served as an assistant professor at Sanford Children’s where he met the same remarkable patient that Dr. Keros later cared for. When he moved to Phoenix, he was struck by how similar a second young patient’s symptoms were. Both of these patients were later found to have the exact same mutation in KCNMA1.

Michael has authored over 70 peer-reviewed publications. His research is currently funded by the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders & Stroke (NINDS) and the Cerebral Palsy Alliance Research Foundation. Michael serves as grant reviewer for the National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense, among others. Dr. Kruer is on the scientific advisory board of the Spastic Paraplegia Foundation, ForeBatten Foundation, and Cerebral Palsy Foundation. He is chair of the International Cerebral Palsy Genomics Consortium and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Child Neurology. Dr. Kruer’s award include a Clinical Scientist Development Award from the Doris Duke Foundation, the Shields Award from the Child Neurology Foundation, and the Laura Dozer Award from United Cerebral Palsy.

More information on Dr. Kruer and his lab can be found at www.kruerlab.org