Interview with Prof. Dr. Paul R. Carney—Conference Chair at The 1st International Online Conference on Children’s Health (IOCCH 2026)
1. Could you please briefly introduce yourself?
I’m Paul Carney, a board-certified pediatric neurologist and epileptologist, and Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology at the University of Missouri. My career has spanned three academic medical centers—the University of Florida, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and now Missouri—where I’ve built and directed comprehensive pediatric epilepsy, epilepsy surgery, neurogenetics, and rare-disease programs. I trained in pediatrics at Rainbow Babies and Children’s in Cleveland and completed fellowships in pediatric neurology, epilepsy and clinical neurophysiology, and sleep medicine at the University of Michigan. Over more than two decades, I’ve worn three hats more or less at once: clinician caring for children with the most complex and drug-resistant epilepsies, researcher working at the intersection of neurology, neuroengineering, and genetics, and educator and mentor to the next generation. I’m also fluent in Spanish—I earned my medical degree in Chile and lived there for a decade—which has shaped a lot of my international collaboration.
2. What were the important turning points or challenges in your academic career, and how did you overcome them?
A few stand out. The first was committing early to a genuinely interdisciplinary path. When I joined the University of Florida, I took joint appointments in biomedical engineering and neuroscience alongside pediatrics and neurology. At the time, embedding a clinician inside engineering labs wasn’t common, and it meant constantly translating between two languages—clinical medicine and computational modeling. The payoff was a body of work on seizure prediction and neural-network dynamics that wouldn’t have been possible from inside any one department.
A second turning point was moving between institutions and effectively rebuilding programs from scratch—division chief and medical director roles, founding an ACGME fellowship, standing up Level 4 epilepsy programs. Each move carried the risk of losing momentum. What carried me through was treating program-building as its own discipline: recruit good people, align the clinical and research missions, and be patient about compounding gains.
The most recent pivot has been toward neurogenetics and precision medicine—founding the genetic autism and genetic epilepsy programs at Missouri. The challenge there is that rare-disease science moves faster than infrastructure and funding can keep up with. The way through has been partnership—state agencies, foundations, families, and industry—rather than waiting for any single funding stream.
3. What are the core scientific questions and which directions are you most optimistic about over the next 3–5 years?
The central pain point in my field hasn’t fundamentally changed: roughly a third of people with epilepsy don’t achieve seizure control with available medications, and for many genetic and developmental epilepsies we still treat symptoms rather than mechanisms. The core questions are how to predict seizures reliably, how to intervene precisely in the right circuit at the right moment, and how to move from a genetic diagnosis to a genuinely disease-modifying therapy.
Over the next three to five years, I’m most optimistic about a few convergent directions. First, gene-targeted and precision therapeutics for monogenic epilepsies and neurodevelopmental disorders—we now routinely identify the variant; the frontier is doing something about it. Second, closed-loop neuromodulation and the maturation of seizure-prediction algorithms—combining better signal analysis with machine learning to actually anticipate and pre-empt seizures rather than react to them. Third, the integration of computational modeling and AI into both diagnosis and trial design. And fourth, advanced neuroimaging that lets us map epileptic networks non-invasively. The exciting part is that these aren’t separate tracks—genetics, devices, imaging, and computation are starting to inform one another.
4. In your opinion, what are the most important qualities of an outstanding researcher?
Intellectual honesty above everything—the willingness to follow the data even when it contradicts your favorite hypothesis. Beyond that, I’d name persistence, because meaningful problems rarely yield on the first attempt and funding cycles test your resolve. Genuine curiosity that crosses disciplinary boundaries—some of my best work came from sitting in engineering and physics seminars I had no formal training for. And finally, generosity as a mentor. The measure of a research career isn’t only your own papers; it’s the investigators you help launch. I’ve been fortunate to train people now leading their own labs and programs, and that’s among the work I’m proudest of.
5. What are you most looking forward to at this year’s conference?
Honestly, the conversations between the sessions as much as the sessions themselves. The most valuable part of any meeting is watching people from adjacent fields—clinicians, geneticists, engineers, computational scientists—discover they’ve been circling the same problem from different angles. I’m especially looking forward to the work coming from younger investigators, who tend to arrive without the assumptions the rest of us have accumulated, and to seeing where the field’s thinking has genuinely shifted in the past year.
6. Why should someone attend? What will they gain that they can’t get elsewhere, and what would you say to young researchers or first-time attendees?
A focused conference offers something you can’t reconstruct from reading the literature alone: the chance to see where a field is actually heading before it’s published, and to build the relationships that turn into collaborations and careers. You meet the people behind the papers, you get unfiltered reactions to your own work, and you find the collaborators who have the method or model you’re missing.
To young researchers and first-time attendees: don’t wait until your work is perfect to engage. Present the poster, ask the question in the session, introduce yourself to the speaker whose work you admire—most of us are far more approachable than we appear from the podium. Some of my longest collaborations began as a hallway conversation at a meeting like this one. The field grows by being porous, and you belong in it from your very first abstract.
7. Is there anything else you’d like to add to encourage participation?
Only this: epilepsy and neurodevelopmental research is at one of its most hopeful moments in decades, with genetics, neuroengineering, and computation finally converging on the patients who’ve waited longest for answers. That progress depends entirely on people choosing to show up, share what hasn’t worked as readily as what has, and pull the next generation in alongside them. Whether you’re a senior investigator or attending your first meeting, you have something to contribute—so come, participate fully, and help move the field forward.
Introduction of IOCCH 2026:
Conference date: 17–19 November 2026;
Deadline for abstract submission: 17 July 2026;
Deadline for registration: 12 November 2026.
Conference Chair:
- Prof. Dr. Paul R. Carney, Departments of Child Health and Neurology, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA.
For more details, please visit the following link: https://sciforum.net/event/IOCCH2026.
For any enquiries regarding the event, please get in touch with iocch2026@mdpi.com.