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Dr. Kristen Barbour is a board-certified pediatric neurologist and fellow in medical genetics at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Medical Degree with Honors in Research from Weill Cornell Medical College.

In her clinical work, Dr. Barbour enjoys working with children and adults who have neurologic conditions to evaluate potential genetic causes. She has experience seeing people with epilepsy, intellectual disability, autism, cerebral palsy, movement disorders, white matter disorders, brain malformations, and other medical and neurologic conditions. She hopes to reach a genetic diagnosis whenever possible to help families understand the diagnosis and what to expect. This includes monitoring for potential medical problems associated with a genetic diagnosis, identifying treatments, considering clinical trials, and interpreting the available research. In many cases, this also includes connecting families to advocacy, research, and support groups.

In her research, Dr. Barbour works with people who have rare neurogenetic conditions to study the off-label use of medications for these conditions, including for STXBP1, SLC6A1, SYNGAP, and PURA syndrome.

Dr. Barbour has an additional interest in using data stored in our electronic health records (EHRs) to learn from previous clinical experiences. Within this area, she developed automated tools to analyze text of physician notes to study rare occurrences in medicine. For example, she used natural language processing to identify epilepsy risk factors in EHRs, study patient counseling practices, and identify individuals with rare diseases for epidemiologic research.

In her spare time, she enjoys running on the beach and reading fiction from amazon's top 20 list.