Professor Željka Petelin Gadže, MD, PhD, neurologist-epileptologist and scientific adviser, has been working at the Department of Neurology, Zagreb University Hospital Centre and School of Medicine, University of Zagreb, Croatia, since 2001. In April 2017 she was appointed Head of the Referral Centre for Epilepsy of the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Croatia, which has been Affiliated Member of the ERN EpiCARE since 2019. In March 2022 she was appointed Full Professor of Neurology at the School of Medicine, University of Zagreb.
Her fields of scientific interest are epileptology and electroencephalography. Following her education at the Clinic for Epileptology of the University of Bonn, Germany, and at the Schweizerisches Epilepsie-Zentrum, Zürich, as a member of the interdisciplinary team for epilepsy surgery, she introduced new diagnostic procedures in Croatia: semi-invasive video-EEG monitoring with sphenoidal electrodes and invasive video-EEG monitoring after implantation of subdural and depth brain electrodes, with the cortical stimulation procedure in 2010.
She was also a member of the interdisciplinary team which successfully performed first Wada test in Croatia in November 2009. Likewise, her clinical interest is neuromodulation therapy. She has authored or co-authored more than 100 papers in the field of neurology, from which 62 are original scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, and 30 are chapters in books. She is the editor of one international and three Croatian books, of which it stands out university manual “Epilepsy – diagnostic and therapeutic approach“ (Zagreb, Medicinska naklada, 2019). In 2018 she completed the ILAE-VIREPA Advanced Course “EEG in the Diagnosis and Management of Epilepsy“ and was awarded an Honours Certificate. She has held 113 invited lectures at Croatian and international scientific conferences, and in many of those conferences she was also a a member of Organizing Committees.
She is a member of the Management Board of the Croatian League Against Epilepsy and Past President of the Croatian Medical Association’s Society for EEG and Clinical Neurophysiology. From 2019 she has been CONy Ambassador for Croatia. She is one of the initiators of the Purple Day annotation in Croatia, that has started in 2010. Since 2015, every year she has been chosen as one of the best doctors in the Republic of Croatia (according to the votes of patients on the website www.najdoktor.com).
