Dr. Pedley is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Neurology, Chairman of the Department of Neurology at Columbia University′s College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Neurologist-in-Chief at the Neurological Institute of New York Presbyterian Hospital at the Columbia University Medical Center. After completing his training, he was a member of the faculty at the School of Medicine at Stanford University from 1975-1978. He then spent a year as a Visiting Research Scholar in London working at the Institute of Psychiatry and King′s College Hospital before joining the Faculty of Medicine at Columbia in 1979.

Dr. Pedley has devoted his entire professional career to epilepsy and made both basic laboratory and clinical contributions to the field. He has had laboratory interests in the role played by the ionic microenvironment in abnormal hippocampal and cortical excitability, and in long-lasting changes in hippocampal excitability induced by repeated seizures. More recently, Dr. Pedley has been collaborating in family studies of epilepsy, identification of genes associated with human epilepsy syndromes, and epilepsy surgery. Among his many publications related to clinical neurophysiology and epilepsy, Dr. Pedley is co-editor with Dr. John Ebersole of Current Practice of Clinical EEG, now in its third edition, and, with Dr. Jerome Engel, Jr., of the 3-volume work, Epilepsy: A Comprehensive Textbook, now in its second edition. He is also co-editor with Dr. Lewis P. Rowland of Merritt′s Textbook of Neurology (12th edition).

Dr. Pedley has been President of the American Neurological Association, American Clinical Neurophysiology Society, the American Epilepsy Society, and the Epilepsy Foundation of America where he was later Chairman of the Board. His is also active in the American Academy of Neurology, where he a member of the Board of Directors. Dr. Pedley was Editor-in-Chief of Epilepsia, the international professional journal of epilepsy, from 1994 to 2001, and he has also served on the Executive Committee of the International League Against Epilepsy. He is currently a member of the National Advisory Neurological Disorders and Stroke Council of the NINDS/NIH.

Dr. Pedley has received many honors and awards for his work, including the 2006 William G. Lennox Award of the American Epilepsy Society for lifetime achievements, and he has been a visiting professor at universities and hospitals throughout the US and in countries around the world. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2007.