Dr Gillinder has a joint clinical appointment as an Epileptologist at the Mater Advanced Epilepsy Unit, and Neurologist / Epileptologist at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane. Dr Gillinder is the first person to undertake a surgical epilepsy fellowship in Queensland and the first person to be trained in SEEG within Australia. She is now one of only a few epileptologists in Australia qualified and practicing in stereo-electroencephalography (SEEG).
Dr Gillinder has a strong research focus and is the lead of the Mater epilepsy research group. Her clinical studies are centred around improving epilepsy diagnostics and her pivotal work is investigating a link between seizure semiology and autoimmunity in patients with refractory epilepsy. Dr Gillinder’ s other clinical research studies are directed towards identifying novel epilepsy biomarkers, investigating medication optimisation for Video EEG evaluation, improving functional MRI capabilities for pre-surgical language assessment and optimising neuropsychological language evaluations.
Dr Gillinder is also passionate about pre-clinical research, which began during the completion of her MPhil in MRI spectroscopy. Currently, in her role as the clinical lead of the Mater Neuroscience research program she has been a driving force in improving clinical - preclinical collaborations. Dr Gillinder is now a fellow of the Mater Research Institute and Queensland Brain institute where she works collaboratively with pre-clinical researchers and including research investigating the fundamental computations of human neurons and the study of hippocampal progenitor cells
The impact of Dr Gillinder’s work was recently recognised by her receipt of the AMSR Clinician Researcher award and the WIT rising star award. She was also first runner up for the Research Australia Frontiers award.