Assistant Professor of Surgery, University of California, San Diego
Sharona Ben-Haim, MD is a neurosurgeon who specializes in caring for people with treatment-resistant epilepsy, chronic pain including facial pain and trigeminal neuralgia, spasticity, and movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, dystonia and essential tremor.
Dr. Ben-Haim is an expert in leading-edge surgical epilepsy treatments, including selective temporal lobectomies, responsive neurostimulation, and MRI-guided laser induced interstitial thermotherapy (laser ablation) for treatment-resistant epilepsy as well as gamma knife radiosurgery. She also serves as a neurotrauma consultant to the NFL. She completed a fellowship in epilepsy and functional surgery at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, and was a visiting fellow in functional neurosurgery at University of Oxford in Oxford, England. Dr. Ben-Haim completed residency training in neurosurgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. She earned her medical degree from UC San Diego School of Medicine.
Research Interest
Dr. Ben-Haim’s research is focused on novel tools that will help localize and treat epileptic seizures more selectively using minimally invasive techniques. Dr. Ben-Haim’s work in movement disorders and improvements in technique for deep-brain stimulation insertion has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including European Spine Journal, Neurosurgery, Journal of Craniofacial Surgery, World Neurosurgery, Pediatric Neurosurgery, Neuropathology, and Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery. In 2014, she authored a book chapter for Textbook of Cortical Brain Stimulation.
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Select Publications
- Ben-Haim, S., Asaad, W. F., Gale, J. T., & Eskandar, E. N. (2009). Risk factors for hemorrhage during microelectrode-guided deep brain stimulation and the introduction of an improved microelectrode design. Neurosurgery, 64(4), 754-763.
- Keshavarzi, S., Hayden, M. G., Ben-Haim, S., Meltzer, H. S., Cohen, S. R., & Levy, M. L. (2009). Variations of endoscopic and open repair of metopic craniosynostosis. Journal of Craniofacial Surgery, 20(5), 1439-1444.
- Gologorsky, Y., Ben-Haim, S., Moshier, E. L., Godbold, J., Tagliati, M., Weisz, D., & Alterman, R. L. (2011). Transgressing the ventricular wall during subthalamic deep brain stimulation surgery for Parkinson disease increases the risk of adverse neurological sequelae. Neurosurgery, 69(2), 294-300.