Congratulations to Dr Richard Newton from United Kingdom who will be awarded honorary EPNS membership during the EPNS Congress networking event in Athens which is due to take place on the evening of Thursday 19 September 2019. EPNS honorary members are described in our constitution as ‘persons the society wishes to honour for outstanding distinction in the field of paediatric neurology.’
Biographical and achievement details:
Date and place of birth: Lincolnshire, UK. 1950
Undergraduate and postgraduate training: Undergraduate at Guy’s and King’s College Hospital Medical School, London. After a General Practice Vocational Training Scheme in Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire gaining useful experience in family medicine he completed Higher Specialist Training in Paediatric Neurology in Manchester under Dr Neil Gordon and Paris with Dr Jean Aicardi.
Present appointments – Affiliation: Honorary Consultant Neurologist, Royal Manchester Children’s Hospitals, since 1983 where he was Medical Director from 1988 to 1997.
Major contributions to Paediatric Neurology
He is a founder member and past-President of the European Association of Learning Disability Medicine (MAMH). He was Treasurer, National Training Adviser and then President of the British Paediatric Neurology Association (BPNA) from 2001-2004. Using his managerial skills he established the BPNA Secretariat which offers the EPNS administrative support. He was the developer of the BPNA Distance-Learning Course which has now enrolled students from 57 countries. From 2010-2014 he was Chairman of the EPNS Education and Training Committee. During his tenure he was able to: Finalise a speciality syllabus now accepted by the European academy of Pediatrics and Neurology Board (both responsible to the European Union of Medical specialists (UEMS); develop an annual four-day residential Training Course to cover the syllabus on a three-year rolling programme with set learning objectives and a bursary system; he arranged the first course in Leeds in 2006 and subsequently in Cheile Gradistei, Roumania 2009-2011 and in Sarajevo, 2011-2014. Establish the process for course host competition which selected Budapest and then Alicante as the next host sites and a template for the international peer-review Training Centre Visits. To complement the WHO inspired project Neurology in the First Year of Life courses were delivered in Tbilisi, Georgia (a forerunner of the now established biennial Caucasian course) Astana, Kazakhstan and in 2019 Uzbekistan. He is the author of over 80 peer-reviewed papers, 21 chapters and author/editor of 4 books, including the Oxford University Press Handbook in Paediatric Neurology, with a special research interest in febrile seizures, psycho-social stress in pregnancy and its relationship to adverse outcome, the immunological basis of childhood encephalopathy, headache and medical aspects of Down syndrome.