Rate My Professor Terence O'Brien

Professor Terence O'Brien, MBBS, MD, FRACP, FRCPE, FAHMS, FAES, serves as Chair of Medicine (Neurology) and Head of the School of Translational Medicine in Monash University's Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences. He holds concurrent leadership positions as Program Director of Alfred Brain, Deputy Director of Research at Alfred Health, and Director of Neurology at Alfred Hospital. Appointed Dean of the Sub-Faculty of Translational Medicine and Public Health effective August 2026, O'Brien was previously Van Cleef Roet Professor of Neuroscience at Monash University (2017-2020), Head of the Departments of Neuroscience and Medicine (2017-2020), Head of the Central Clinical School (2020-2024), and James Stewart Professor of Medicine at the University of Melbourne (2008-2017). His training included clinical work at St Vincent’s and Royal Melbourne Hospitals and advanced research at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota (1995-1998).

O'Brien specializes in epilepsy and neurodegenerative diseases, focusing on neuropharmacology, pre-clinical and clinical drug development, in-vivo imaging, biomarkers of treatment response, epileptogenesis, disease progression, traumatic brain injury, and dementia therapies. He leads the O'Brien group in the Department of Neuroscience, founded Australia's largest Neuroscience Clinical Trials Unit at The Alfred (2018), and chairs the Australian Epilepsy Clinical Trials Network since 2014. Immediate past President of the Epilepsy Society of Australia, he has supervised 58 PhD students, 11 masters, 70 honours/medical research students, 28 clinical epilepsy fellows, and 21 post-doctoral fellows to completion. Authoring over 820 peer-reviewed papers cited more than 48,000 times, notable publications include "Epilepsy research in 2025: sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, artificial intelligence and seizure classification" (The Lancet Neurology, 2026), "Adjunctive Transdermal Cannabidiol for Adults with Focal Epilepsy: A Randomized Clinical Trial" (JAMA Network Open, 2022), and "Association between local gray matter volume differences and stereo-electroencephalography-defined epileptogenicity" (Epilepsia, 2026). Awards include the James Lance Oration and Award (Australian and New Zealand Association of Neurologists, 2023), Fritz E. Dreifuss Lecture and Award (American Epilepsy Society, 2022), Ambassador for Epilepsy Award (International League Against Epilepsy, 2017), Dreifuss-Penry Epilepsy Award (American Academy of Neurology, 2006), and Eccles Lecturer and Medallion (Australian Neuroscience Society, 2011). He has attracted substantial funding from NHMRC, Medical Research Future Fund, ARC, and NIH.