I take care of children with epilepsy as a pediatric epileptologist. While the majority of patients have a good response to available antiseizure medications, a subset of patients experience medication refractory seizures, and even those whose seizures are under good control experience a range of mood and/or cognitive comorbidities. Genetics has identified variants in hundreds of genes that lead to epilepsy, but our understanding of how these changes cause seizures and epilepsy-related comorbidities is incomplete. I am interested in how epilepsy-associated gene variants alter the brain during development, specifically with a focus on synaptic connections between neurons.