UCSD Profiles

Dr. Olivia Kim-McManus is an Associate Clinical Professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine Department of Neurosciences and a pediatric neurologist and epileptologist at Rady Children's Hospital Division of Pediatric Neurology.

Dr. Olivia Kim-McManus is Board certified in Neurology with special qualifications in Child Neurology and a Board-certified epileptologist with additional expertise in Pediatric Epilepsy and Clinical Neurophysiology.

Dr. Kim-McManus completed undergraduate studies at Columbia University in New York City with a degree in Neurosciences. She received a National Institutes of Health Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award and subsequently trained at Children's National Medical Center, earning her medical doctorate from the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. She completed residencies in pediatrics and neurology at Children's Hospital Los Angeles/University of Southern California. Subsequently, she completed two additional fellowships at UC Irvine School of Medicine/Children's Hospital Orange County to further specialize in pediatric epilepsy and clinical neurophysiology.

She specializes in treating infants, children and adolescents with pediatric neurological conditions including neurological conditions related to brain malformations, underlying genetic etiologies, intellectual disabilities and neurodevelopmental problems of childhood. Her primary expertise and interests include pediatric epilepsy, epilepsy genetics, and epilepsy surgery. She performs invasive intracranial electroencephalography monitoring with stereotactic depth electrodes or grid electrodes and intraoperative electrocorticography. She treats medically intractable epilepsy patients with ketogenic diet therapy in addition to surgical procedures including resective brain surgery, hemispherectomy, minimally invasive laser ablation therapy and/or implantable neuromodulation devices such as responsive neurostimulation (RNS), deep brain stimulation (DBS) and vagal nerve stimulation (VNS) as alternative therapies to medications.

Dr. Kim-McManus primarily sees pediatric patients with epilepsy at Rady Children's Hospital in the Division of Pediatric Neurology. She also monitors infants with neonatal seizures on continuous EEG in the neonatal intensive care unit at UC San Diego Jacobs Medical Center.

Her research activities include site principal investigator in a multicenter research study with UC Irvine and UC Berkeley/UCSF involving memory and cognition in pediatric epilepsy surgery patients undergoing intracranial EEG monitoring. She is a principal investigator and co-investigator in multiple additional epilepsy trials involving antisense oligonucleotide drugs in rare developmental epileptic encephalopathies (Dravet Syndrome, SCN2A, Angelman Syndrome), mitochondrial epilepsies and software development for absence epilepsy. She is a PI for n=1 individualized antisense oligonucleotide therapies for children at Rady Children's Hospital with severe developmental epileptic encephalopathies due to rare genetic causes. She serves on the Rady Children's Institute of Genomic Medicine Task Force for Clinical Whole Genome Sequencing and The N=1 Collaborative Institutional Implementations and Clinical Outcomes Task Forces to bring forward rare disease therapies for children with unmet need.

Dr. Kim-McManus established and directs the Neuro-Infusion Program for Batten's Disease (Late infantile ceroid neuronal lipofuscinosis type 2) at Rady Children's Hospital, a bi-weekly cerliponase alfa enzyme replacement delivered intraventricularly via Ommaya reservoir, a disease-modifying therapy for rare, pediatric neurodegenerative disease.

Dr. Olivia Kim-McManus is also the director of the Pediatric Epilepsy Fellowship Program at UC San Diego, Rady Children's Hospital where she trains medical students, residents and fellows.

She is also the Neurology Section Vice Chief of Medical Staff at Rady Children's Hospital and a Professional Advisory Board member of the Epilepsy Foundation of San Diego.

Dr. Kim-McManus is a member of the American Epilepsy Society, Child Neurology Society and American Academy of Neurology.

In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her husband and three children.