Dr. David Auerbach
Dr. David Auerbach
Department of Pharmacology
SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY 13210
Phone: 315-464-7952
Email: auerbacd@upstate.edu
David Auerbach is an Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at SUNY Upstate Medical University, a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Program, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine-Cardiovascular Research at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
He completed his bachelors training at Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY) with a major in Human Physiology and a minor in Law and Society. Next, he earned a masters from the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Case Western Reserve University. He conducted his doctoral studies in the laboratory of Dr. Jose Jalife, a pioneer in cardiac arrhythmia mechanisms, at in the Department of Pharmacology at SUNY Upstate Medical University. He provided key insights into the substrates (structural heterogeneities) and triggers (alterations in ion channel expression and function) for the initiation of lethal cardiac arrhythmias. Subsequently, he completed a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan under the mentorship of Dr. Lori Isom, an expert in genetic sodium channel diseases. Dr. Auerbach demonstrated that in severe genetic forms of epilepsy, there are not only alterations in electrical function in the brain, but also in the heart, resulting in both seizures and cardiac arrhythmias. In 2014 Dr. Auerbach joined the University of Rochester Medical Center, where he developed expertise in clinical database analysis. He showed that patients with an inherited disease linked to cardiac arrhythmias also are at a high risk of seizures and epilepsy.
In 2019 he was very excited to return to SUNY Upstate to start his independent research program and build a productive, collegial, and all-around fun research team. In addition to graduate/medical teaching, and lectures at scientific meetings, he often speaks at patient advocacy group events. Through interactions with the families of patients with severe genetic diseases, he developed the passion and determination to advance the understanding of electrical diseases of both the brain (seizures) and heart (arrhythmias), and to understand the multi-system cascade of events that lead to Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy Patients (SUDEP).