Rate My Professor Eishi Asano

Eishi Asano, MD, PhD, is Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology at Wayne State University School of Medicine within the Medicine faculty. He received his MD from Tohoku University School of Medicine in Sendai, Japan, in 1996, a PhD in Neurosurgery from Tohoku University in 2002, and an MS in Clinical Research Design and Statistical Analysis from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2007. His training encompasses a residency in Neurosurgery at Tohoku University from 1996 to 1998, followed by research fellowships at Wayne State University as Research Fellow in Neuroimaging from 1998 to 2000 and in Clinical Neurophysiology from 2000 to 2002, and a Clinical Fellowship in Pediatric Neurology and Clinical Neurophysiology from 2002 to 2004. Since 2004, Dr. Asano has served as Teaching Faculty at Wayne State University and Medical Director of Neurodiagnostics at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, contributing centrally to epilepsy presurgical evaluations, including invasive monitoring, for more than 500 patients ranging from neonates to adults.

Dr. Asano is a leading expert in functional brain mapping, specializing in epilepsy, clinical neurophysiology, and human brain mapping. His laboratory aims to optimize seizure control and quality of life post-surgery for patients with drug-resistant epilepsy or brain tumors by localizing seizure foci and essential functional regions using techniques such as EEG, intracranial electrocorticography, cortico-cortical evoked potentials, diffusion-weighted tractography, and 3D-surface rendered MRI. A key achievement is the development of a four-dimensional functional brain atlas animating neural modulations with 1-10 ms temporal resolution (Brain, 2017;140:1351-1370). From 2008 to 2017, he published 51 papers as first or last author on intracranial neural recording and stimulation in major neurology and neuroscience journals, six with editorials and five as journal covers. Notable works include "Presurgical language mapping using event-related high-gamma activity: the Detroit procedure" (Clin Neurophysiol, 2018;129:145-154), "Four-dimensional map of the human early visual system" (Clin Neurophysiol, 2018;129:188-197; cover), and "Brain network dynamics in the human articulatory loop" (Clin Neurophysiol, 2017;128:1473-1487; cover). His research has received continuous NIH funding since 2004, including an NINDS grant from 2009 to 2019. He was an editorial board member for Clinical Neurophysiology from 2009 to 2016 and selected as a 2017 Health Care Hero by Crain’s Detroit Business. Dr. Asano teaches courses such as Fundamentals of Neuropsychiatric Disorders and Fundamentals of Neuroimaging.