Director, Pediatric Headache Program, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; Instructor, Neurology, University of Pennsylvania (current); Assistant Professor, Neurology (July 2017+)Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, USA
Christina Szperka, MD, has been interested in the treatment of chronic pain since she was an undergraduate at Amherst College and a medical student at Yale University. Her interest focused on headache medicine during residencies in pediatrics and child neurology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). She completed fellowship at the Jefferson Headache Center, including a few weeks at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Headache Center. She returned to CHOP in 2011 for a fellowship in neurological epidemiology to learn the skills of clinical research.
In July 2013 Dr. Szperka became Director of CHOP’s new Headache Program with the goal of improving the care of children with headache through research and quality improvement work, fully integrated with clinical care. She led the development of a multidisciplinary headache clinic for children with refractory headaches. She has partnered with colleagues to develop emergency department and inpatient pathways, and outpatient data collection tools to standardize and improve care in each setting. Her current research focuses on utilising the electronic medical record to improve headache care, and development of novel trial designs for pediatric headache. As such, she is particularly interested in issues of trial design in children when testing the novel CRGP agents.
