Heather J. Fullerton MD, MAS

Dr. Heather Fullerton is a pediatric vascular neurologist and director of the Pediatric Stroke and Cerebrovascular Disease Center at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is the medical director of the Pediatric Brain Center at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital and Chief of the Division of Child Neurology. After graduating from Baylor College of Medicine in 1996, she came to UCSF for her pediatrics residency and child neurology fellowship and then joined the child neurology faculty in 2002. She continued her training at UCSF with a vascular neurology fellowship (2003-2003) and Masters in Clinical Research (2003-2005). She established the multidisciplinary Pediatric Stroke and Cerebrovascular Disease Center in 2006.

She has published on cerebrovascular disease in childhood: risk factors for childhood stroke, predictors of stroke recurrence in children, gender and ethnic disparities in childhood stroke, pediatric arterial dissections, stroke in sickle cell disease, stroke risk in children with brain arteriovenous malformations, outcomes of children with vein of Galen malformations, and stroke in survivors of childhood cancer. She leads the Kaiser Pediatric Stroke Study, a cohort study utilizing the population of children enrolled in a large Northern Californian healthcare plan.

She is on the executive committee of the International Pediatric Stroke Study, an international consortium of pediatric stroke investigators. Since 2009, she has been co-leading the largest-ever NIH funded study of childhood stroke, the Vascular effects of Infection in Pediatric Stroke (VIPS) Study, which is enrolled 350 children with arterial ischemic strokes from 39 centers around the globe.