Réjean “Rej” Guerriero, DO, has been appointed the section head for Pediatric Epilepsy, effective July 1, 2024. Concurrently, Stuart Tomko, MD, will become medical director of the St. Louis Children’s Hospital Epilepsy Monitoring Unit and Neurophysicology Laboratory, which is a National Association of Epilepsy Centers Level 4 (highest level) Pediatric Epilepsy Center. Guerriero will direct the St. Louis Children’s Hospital Pediatric Epilepsy Center with Jarod Roland, MD, assistant professor of Neurosurgery.
Guerriero earned his BS in Neuroscience from Bates College and graduated from the University of New England Osteopathic Medical School. He completed his Pediatric Neurology Residency at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Guerriero and Tomko, both associate professors of Neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, trained in Epilepsy and Clinical Neurophysiology at Boston Children’s Hospital. Guerriero has been a member of WashU Medicine faculty since 2016. Guerriero has attended all of the pediatric neurology and epilepsy clinical services and has held roles in resident and neurocritical care education. His research involves using EEG and quantitative EEG monitoring to improve the care and outcomes of pediatric and neonatal patients in the ICU.
Tomko earned his BS in Psychology from Davidson College and graduated from Baylor College of Medicine, where he also completed his residency in Pediatric Neurology. In addition to the epilepsy and clinical neurophysiology fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Tomko also completed a pediatric neuroimmunology fellowship. Tomko has been a member of WashU Medicine faculty since 2017. Tomko is interested in epilepsy surgery and particularly the use of stereotactic EEG (sEEG) in surgical evaluation. He also has experience managing inflammatory epilepsies, including Rasmussen encephalitis and febrile infection-related epilepsy syndrome. His research involves the use of quantitative EEG as a clinical biomarker and treatment of rare neuroinflammatory conditions.
They were preceded in these roles by Kwee Liu Lin Thio, MD, and John Zempel, MD, PhD, respectively. Thio directed the Pediatric Epilepsy Center since 2006 and Zempel led the EEG Monitoring Unit and EEG lab since 2004. In these roles, they grew Pediatric Epilepsy from five to 15 faculty, three to 20 EEG technologists, and EEG Monitoring Unit from four to ten beds while moving three times around the hospital with two major technology adoptions. The outpatient EEG lab expanded from two to seven beds across three sites, performing more than 2,500 studies annually. In addition, they added a dedicated ketogenic diet clinic, two clinical neurophysiologists, Tuberous Sclerosis Clinic, Rett Syndrome Clinic, ACGME accredited pediatric epilepsy fellowship, sEEG, autoinjector ICTAL SPECT, ICU-EEG service, functional MRI, deep brain and responsive brain stimulation and high-density EEG. The Pediatric epilepsy Center has performed more than 1,000 surgeries, participated in the Epilepsy Genome/Phenome Project and the Human Epilepsy Project and is now a member of the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium. With the support of SLCH, the Pediatric Epilepsy center also developed the Pediatric Advanced Technologies Clinic (PEATC), which has served more than 500 regional patients with treatment resistant epilepsy over the past five years.
Thio will continue to serve as the director of the Pediatric Epilepsy Fellowship program and Letogenic Diet Clinic, and both Thio and Zempel will continue their clinical and research activities in epilepsy. Thanks to Thio and Zempel for their many years of leadership, and congratulations to Guerriero and Tomko on their new roles in the Department of Neurology.