Zubeda Sheikh, MD

Biography

An advocate for quality epilepsy care

VCU Health is one of the top centers in the nation for epilepsy diagnosis and treatment. And Zubeda Sheikh, MD is one of the neurologists on the team ensuring the health system’s prominence and leadership in the field only grows.

Sheikh is board-certified in neurology, epilepsy, clinical neurophysiology and Critical Care EEG. “My expertise is in evaluating spells of unclear cause, diagnosing and treating epilepsy, and evaluating drug-resistant epilepsy to assess potential benefit from surgery and devices,” says Sheikh, who attended medical school in India before her internship and residency at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and a fellowship at Yale University

For Sheikh, it was a long-held personal fascination with the human brain that brought her to the field of neurology. She further chose to specialize in epilepsy, “because it is a neurologic condition that affects people of all ages and can cause disability in young and otherwise healthy people,” she says.

“But epilepsy is also treatable with medicine with or without advanced surgical and device-related interventions,” she adds. “Epilepsy is a chronic disease, so care demands an individualized approach based on other conditions and physiological states such as adolescence, pregnancy or the elderly. I want my patients to feel heard and that they can make decisions that best fit them.”

In 2023, Sheikh joined VCU Health, designated as a Level 4 Epilepsy Center by the National Association of Epilepsy Centers. The ranking makes the health system one of the top centers in the nation for such care. By serving as the Director of the Adult Clinical Neurophysiology Service, she hopes to keep up the quality of epilepsy care and expand services in this geographic region.

Sheikh is also an avid researcher in the field, focusing her study on critical care EEG in diagnosing acute seizures in critically ill patients, in non-seizure conditions in critically ill patients, and use of limited montage EEG systems. As an Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Neurology at the VCU School of Medicine and the Program Director for Epilepsy Fellowship, Sheikh is also educating the first-line future epilepsy care providers and researchers.

Advice to patients: “Don’t settle for any less than the highest-quality medical care, especially if you face a medical challenge.”