Lekha M. Rao, MD

Dr. Lekha M. Rao is triple board certified in Neurology/Child Neurology, Clinical Neurophysiology, and Epilepsy. After obtaining her BA in Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and MD at Drexel University, she completed pediatric residency, child neurology fellowship, and pediatric epilepsy fellowship at UCLA. She was the recipient of a 2011- 2013 Epilepsy Foundation of Greater Los Angeles Care and Cure Fellowship.  Dr. Rao is also sees pediatric epilepsy and neurology patients at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center.

Dr. Rao is a frequent invited lecturer on the topics of pediatric and neonatal seizures, epilepsy, and epilepsy surgery evaluation. She has presented and lectured both nationally and internationally, and published research in movement disorders, acute symptomatic seizures, and neonatal seizures with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy.  She is a member of Child Neurology Society, the American Academy of Neurology, and the Newborn Brain Society, as well as a Fellow of the American Epilepsy Society.  She is also the director of the Pediatric Epilepsy Fellowship track at UCLA and the associate program director for the Child Neurology Residency at UCLA.

Dr. Rao is also a primary investigator on several clinical trials for pediatric and neonatal seizures and epilepsy.

Comprehensive care is a top priority for Dr. Rao, including communicating back with referring providers and working with patients and their families to improve their care. As a result, Dr. Rao has been named a Los Angeles Magazine Top Doctor and Los Angeles Times Super Doctor for several years.

Dr. Rao's clinical expertise includes:

• neonatal seizures
• hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy
• intractable epilepsy and epilepsy surgery evaluation
• new onset seizures
• benign focal epilepsies of childhood
• Landau-Kleffner syndrome (LKS), continuous spike-wave in sleep (CSWS), and other related epileptic encephalopathies associated with electrographic status epilepticus in slow wave sleep (ESES)
• neuromodulation, including vagal nerve stimulation (VNS) and responsive neural stimulation (RNS)
• epilepsy in autism
• second opinion epilepsy consultation