Background
Dr. Joshua Ewen is director of the Kennedy Krieger Institute Research and Clinical Neurophysiology Laboratories. The central research mission of his laboratory is to study the altered brain physiology that underlies cognitive deficits in developmental disabilities, using cognitive psychological and electrophysiological (EEG) techniques. His team currently focuses on the interplay within autism between cognitive and motor control alterations. Their research is federally funded. They also have multiple lines of research into motor and attentional dysfunction in ADHD that is funded federally and through the Johns Hopkins Science of Learning Institute.
In addition, Dr. Ewen is the medical director of the Kennedy Krieger Institute Clinical Neurophysiology Laboratory and sees patients with epilepsy. He has a secondary research interest in the overlap between epilepsy, EEG abnormalities and developmental disabilities.
Further, building on work on a novel EEG-based biomarker that identifies which children born with a facial birthmark have the greatest risk of Sturge-Weber syndrome, he has written and spoken about the experimental methodologies that best validate potentially EEG-based biomarkers.
Finally, the Research Neurophysiology Laboratory is collaborative and supports human scalp EEG-based research from investigators across the greater Johns Hopkins campus. Prominent collaborations have identified the mechanisms the brain uses to focus attention on certain features of objects in a visual scene.
Dr. Ewen serves as assistant professor, Department of Neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as well as assistant professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Ewen received his undergraduate degree in Egyptology from Brown University. He earned his MD from Tulane University School of Medicine. He completed his residency in pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and was in the first class of the Johns Hopkins Hospital/Kennedy Krieger Institute Neurodevelopmental Disabilities training program. He also completed a fellowship in clinical neurophysiology at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2007.
He is a member of several committees dedicated to scientific mentorship at Kennedy Krieger and Johns Hopkins.