Director Bio:
Dr. Donald Phillips is a board-certified pediatric epileptologist and neurophysiologist at CHOC. As an expert in pediatric epilepsy, Dr. Phillips cares for babies, kids, teens and young adults with a wide variety of epilepsy-related health conditions. He specializes in medically complex epilepsy syndromes, surgical epilepsy, epileptic encephalopathy, tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC), and pediatric intraoperative neuromonitoring.
Dr. Phillips is the medical director of the CHOC Comprehensive Epilepsy Center and neurodiagnostic/EEG laboratories, as well as the medical director of the CHOC Tuberous Sclerosis Complex (TSC) Center of Excellence. In these roles, Dr. Phillips has worked to facilitate high quality, accessible and comprehensive care for all patients and families living with epilepsy and TSC.
His research interests include developmental and/or epileptic encephalopathy with spike-wave activation in sleep (D/EE-SWAS), spatial transcriptomics, and epilepsy quality improvement (QI). Dr. Phillips is the site principal investigator for several clinical trials evaluating emerging pharmaceutical and medical device therapies for a variety of rare epilepsy syndromes.
Dr. Phillips earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biochemistry from University of Michigan and his master’s degree in public health from Boston University before obtaining his medical degree from University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. He completed his internship, residency and a fellowship in pediatric epilepsy at University of California Los Angeles. He is a fellow of the American Clinical Neurophysiology Society and the American Epilepsy Society, as well as a member of the Orange County Medical Association.