Q&A with Jamie Capal, MD

Jamie Capal, MD, is the division chief of Child Neurology, Frederick A. Horner, MD, Endowed Distinguished Professorship in Pediatric Neurology, and has appointments in Neurology, Pediatrics, Neuroscience, and the Center for Health and Technology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. She is also the co-director of the Human Clinical Phenotyping and Recruitment Core of the University of Rochester Intellectual Developmental Disability Research Center (UR-IDDRC). She received her undergraduate degree in Biology from Ithaca College and completed her medical degree at Albany Medical College. She completed her residency in pediatrics, neurology with special qualifications in child neurology, and neurodevelopmental disabilities at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. She was most recently an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she helped lead efforts to create the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities (CIDD) Clinical Trials Program.

Please summarize your research.

I focus on neurodevelopmental disabilities, disease modifying therapies, and really the understanding and treatment of neurodevelopment across the lifespan. I’m very involved in tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) and Angelman syndrome and am expanding to Fragile X and Rett syndrome. I have a pilot, non-pharmacologic treatment trial through the Department of Defense in kids and adolescents with TSC who exhibit associated neuropsychiatric difficulties such as emotion dysregulation. This is a two-site clinical trial with Cincinnati and now Rochester.

How did you become interested in your field?

When I was in college, I worked at a residential facility in Oneonta, New York. It used to be called Upstate Home for Children and Adults, and it’s now called Springbrook. I worked in the more medically intense home on the campus. I was a one-on-one aid to a boy with profound autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability, and Down syndrome. I really just loved working with the kids and was involved with all aspects of their lives. I got to go to school with them. I got to take care of all their daily needs. And I really got to interface a lot with the healthcare system and realized that care was extremely fragmented. When I went to medical school, I tried to find a specialty that fit the type of care that I was hoping to provide these children. Partway through my medical school training the Neurodevelopmental Disabilities (NDD) program was developed, and I contacted Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore and spent a month rotating through their program. The NDD program encompassed elements of developmental pediatrics, psychiatry, neurology, and others, which was exactly what I was looking for.

What brought you to the University of Rochester?

My entire family is from Malone, New York. I’d always hoped to move closer to home. The job opportunity came at a good time. While I interviewed, I really enjoyed all the people that I interacted with and realized that there’s a lot of potential to build on what I’m already doing. Being able to collaborate with Dennis Kuo, MD, and Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, and then the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center and the interest from John Foxe, PhD, around neurotherapeutics and rare disease is aligned with my interests as well.

What is your favorite piece of advice?

As far as advice goes, I think a lot of success is driven by being open to new opportunities. To give you an example, when I was a junior faculty in Cincinnati, I never thought about tuberous sclerosis, but my mentor walked into my office and asked if I had thought about being in the TSC clinic and I decided to give it a shot. It completely changed my career. I think having the courage to do things that are out of your comfort zone, and not being afraid to say yes to things—even if you don’t feel fully prepared in the moment—can lead to unexpected opportunities.