Who I am

David Filippi, clean-shaven, in a dark suit and tie, photographed formally. — The formal version.

David Filippi with a beard, photographed informally. — The everyday version.

I'm a mid-career neurologist, board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology since 2004, with subspecialty training in epilepsy. I have spent about three decades in medicine, most of it looking after people with seizures, strokes, and the other things that can go wrong with a nervous system, and teaching the residents and students who will look after them next.

Training

I studied biochemical sciences at Harvard College and went to medical school at the University of Southern California. I trained in neurology at Columbia, at the Neurological Institute of New York, and stayed on there as an attending while doing a fellowship in neuro-epidemiology at Columbia's Sergievsky Center, where my work was in the genetic epidemiology of epilepsy. I then completed an epilepsy fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, learning the medical and surgical management of seizures, EEG, and intraoperative electrocorticography.

Practice

In 2007 I founded CoastNeuro, a neurology group practice on California's Central Coast, and ran it for twelve years. We grew to four neurologists serving San Luis Obispo and northern Santa Barbara counties, with in-office clinical neurophysiology, epilepsy, movement disorder, multiple sclerosis, and memory care, and a clinical research program.

Since 2018 my work has been mostly in hospitals, as a neurohospitalist and stroke neurologist. In Palm Springs I served as core faculty and associate program director of a neurology residency. In the San Francisco Bay Area I covered inpatient stroke and neurocritical care across the Sutter network. In Miami I was a neurohospitalist at HCA Aventura, where I served as medical director of the stroke program, a thrombectomy-capable stroke center, through January 2025. Along the way I have taken locum tenens assignments around the country, including with AdventHealth and Holmes Regional Medical Center in Florida. I hold clinical faculty appointments at three medical schools and still enjoy teaching at the bedside.

The rest of me

I am the father of Frank, who is nonverbal and autistic. Being his dad is a large part of who I am, and it shapes how I think about communication, patience, and what it means to understand another person.

Beyond neurology I write, make music, teach, and build software. My interest in how minds model other minds runs through most of it, from clinical work to Second Person, my project on machine social cognition, to the Significant podcast. I write iPhone and Apple Watch apps under the name Imperia Middleware, write and produce songs as the West Liberty Dulcimer Revue, and bake sourdough. I speak Spanish, and I grew up in Pasadena.