Zelma Kiss

Dr. Zelma Kiss is an Associate Professor of Neurosurgery in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Calgary. She is a Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) Clinician Scientist and a Clinical Scholar of the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research (AHFMR). She directs the regional program in Neuromodulation and her clinical and research interests involve stereotactic and functional neurosurgery.

Dr. Kiss graduated cum laude in Medicine from the University of Ottawa in 1988. After a surgical internship she moved to the University of Toronto for training in neurosurgery in 1989. During the course of her residency she completed a four-year research program defending her PhD at the University of Toronto in 1998 under the mentorship of Drs. Ron Tasker and Jonathan Dostrovsky. She won the Van Wagenen fellowship from the American Association of Neurological Surgery to pursue further post-doctoral training in France with Professor Alim Benabid, the father of deep brain stimulation for movement disorders.

Dr. Kiss’ research interests have focused on the mechanisms of action of deep brain stimulation for movement disorders since her return to Canada in 1998, first at the University of Ottawa and at the University of Calgary since 2000. Throughout both her training and early years on faculty she has received numerous awards and grants to further her research program and has been published in Nature, Journal of Physiology, Journal of Neuroscience, Brain, and others. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Neural Engineering, CIHR grant committees, and is a member of the Parkinson Society of Canada Scientific Advisory Board. Her recent research has extended to the development of Neural Prostheses to restore sensorimotor function. Along with co-leaders in Edmonton, she was recently awarded an AHFMR Interdisciplinary Team Grant on this theme.

Clinically, Dr. Kiss is interested in stereotactic radiosurgery and functional neurosurgery to treat movement disorders, pain, psychiatric disorders, and epilepsy. In addition to this, Dr. Kiss is actively involved in training of residents, post-doctoral fellows and graduate students. She also established and directs the University of Calgary Royal College Clinician Investigator Program.

In her free time, she loves the local Rocky Mountain culture, from hiking, back country skiing and snowshoeing, to attending arts festivals at the Banff Centre.

Updated: 2009-04-27