Investigator Ilana Spokoyny, MD

Dr. Spokoyny is a vascular neurologist at Sutter’s California Pacific Medical Center and the Clinical and Research Director of the Mobile Stroke Unit at Sutter’s Mills-Peninsula Medical Center. She is board certified in neurology and vascular neurology. Dr. Spokoyny sits on the Sutter Health Institutional Review Board, and the Stroke Workgroup of the Sutter Health Bay Area Neuroscience Service Line.

In addition to a passion for the clinical care of stroke and neurocritically ill patients, Dr. Spokoyny is engaged in clinical research, with 10 first-author publications in peer-reviewed journals. Her research pursuits span from from imaging in acute stroke to consent and ethics in stroke treatment. While completing a neurology residency, she created a Stroke Advance Directive that allowed patients to communicate their treatment and care wishes in advance of the stroke event. The findings were published in the Journal of Clinical Ethics.

Dr. Spokoyny focuses on Stroke Systems of Care. She developed patient education initiatives on stroke identification, trained first responders in stroke recognition and treatment, and created electronic tools to optimize clinical trial enrollment for acute stroke patients. Dr. Spokoyny serves as the co-site principal investigator for the BEST-MSU trial at Sutter Health and co-site principal investigator for the TIMELESS study. BEST-MSU and TIMELESS are national, multisite clinical trials.

Dr. Spokoyny obtained an MD at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She completed a neurology residency, including a year as Chief Resident, at UCSD and a vascular neurology fellowship at Stanford, followed by an NIH StrokeNet Research Fellowship.