Gena Ghearing, MD

Gena R. Ghearing, MD is a Professor in the Department of Neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and is the Director of Outreach for the Mount Sinai Epilepsy Center. She cares for patients at the Epilepsy Clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital, Mount Sinai West, and Mount Sinai Queens. Dr. Ghearing reads outpatient and inpatient EEGs, attends in the epilepsy monitoring units, and evaluates patients for epilepsy surgery and neuromodulation. Her research and clinical interests are focused on improving epilepsy care.

Dr. Ghearing’s work has been motivated by the needs of her patients. She is excited about the opportunities to care for a diverse population of people with epilepsy and to participate in patient centered research and education at Mount Sinai. She has an interest in promoting self-care in epilepsy and believes that comprehensive epilepsy care should include self-management support. At Mount Sinai, she will work to expand access to epilepsy self-management and to identify and overcome disparities in epilepsy care by leveraging the electronic medical record, social media, and other new strategies.

Dr. Ghearing completed her neurology residency in 2005, at Mayo Clinic, which was followed by a Clinical Neurophysiology fellowship and then an Epilepsy fellowship at Mayo Clinic. She then worked as an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where she was the director of the EEG lab and developed the adult surgical epilepsy and ICU EEG monitoring programs. Dr. Ghearing joined the faculty as a clinical associate professor at the University of Iowa in 2017, where she was the director of the clinical neurophysiology fellowship. She joined the faculty at Mount Sinai Hospital in 2025 with extensive experience in ICU EEG monitoring, intracranial EEG monitoring, and treatment of intractable epilepsy.

The work of Dr. Ghearing has resulted in publications on epilepsy care disparities, heart rate changes during seizures, pitfalls in EEG monitoring, and epilepsy surgery outcomes. She was a prinicpal investigator for the CDC Managing Epilepsy Well Netowrk, refining and evaluating the efficacy of an epilepsy self-management support program. She has also received repeated recognition for her excellence as an educator and served on education committees for the American Clinical Neurophyiologic Society.