Peter Carlen

Peter L. Carlen MD, FRCPC, obtained his MD from the University of Toronto and his internship and Internal Medicine training at McGill University, completing his Neurology training at the University of Toronto. He also did postgraduate training in cellular electrophysiology for 3 years at the Neurobiology Unit of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is a Professor in Medicine (Neurology), Physiology, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto. He was formerly the Head of Neurology at the Addiction Research Foundation. In 1989, he was appointed Director of the Playfair Neuroscience Unit and Neuroscience Research at the University Health Network for a 10 year term, where he is now a Senior Scientist. He has over 300 peer-reviewed biomedical publications and 6 patents. His main research interests are mechanisms, pharmacology, and control of neural synchrony and entrainment in epilepsy, sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP), brain state classification, gap junctional communication, and using human cerebral organoids to study epilepsy. He is also an active neurological clinician at the University Health Network (Toronto Western Hospital) with a practice focused mainly on patients with epilepsy.


  • Professor
  • electrophysiology
  • epilepsy
  • human cerebral organoids
  • brainstem seizures
  • cannabis
  • pannexins
  • blood brain barrier