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Ali Seifi, MD, FACP, FNCS, FCCM

Division Chief of Neurocritical Care

Director, Neuro ICU

Neurocritical Care Fellowship Director (UCNS & CAST)

Ali Seifi, M.D., FACP, FNCS, FCCM, is a tenured Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at UT Health San Antonio, where he has served as an attending physician since 2012. He is Division Chief of Neurocritical Care, Director of the Neuro-Intensive Care Unit, and Director of the Neurocritical Care Fellowship (accredited by both UCNS and CAST). He holds cross-appointments in the Departments of Neurology, Anesthesiology, and Internal Medicine. Dr. Seifi oversees the care of patients in University Hospital's state-of-the-art Neuro-ICU ,  the only intensive care unit in the region fully dedicated to neurologically ill patients  and leads the unit's daily operations.

Dr. Seifi received his medical degree with honors from Shiraz University of Medical Sciences (SUMS) in 1996. He completed a residency in Anesthesiology and Critical Care at SUMS, a second residency in Internal Medicine and a Neurocritical Care fellowship at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. He is triple board-certified in Anesthesiology, Internal Medicine, and Neurocritical Care.

His principal clinical interest is the care of critically ill patients, with an emphasis on neurosurgical and medical neurocritical care. He is deeply committed to medical education and was named Star Educator by the Academy of Educational Scholars at UT Health San Antonio in 2023, in addition to receiving the Excellence in Teaching Award from medical students five times.

Dr. Seifi's research program spans clinical outcomes research in neurocritical care and traumatic brain injury alongside a growing focus on artificial intelligence in medicine. Working closely with residents, fellows, and medical students, he leads an ongoing multi-institutional research initiative evaluating the accuracy and hallucination rates of large language models (LLMs) across multiple medical fields, including neurology, neurosurgery, neurocritical care, stroke, critical care, radiology, cardiology, and pediatrics. This body of work which includes benchmarking LLM performance against established clinical guidelines ,  aims to define safe, evidence-based standards for AI use in medical education and clinical decision-making. He is a member of the UCNS C-CERT Examination Committee, where his contributions include developing gap-analysis content on AI/LLMs in neurocritical care.

Dr. Seifi is an invited international lecturer, having presented in the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, France, China, and the United States, including recurring invitations to the Emirates Critical Care Conference. He is principal investigator on several clinical research projects, including the CLUTCH trial an international multicenter study of antihypertensive treatment in acute intracerebral hemorrhage and CerebroFlo EVD Catheter clinical trial . He holds multiple patents, including the Forced Inspiratory Suction and Swallow Tool (FISST), a device for terminating hiccups that reached market as HiccAway. The device demonstrated over 90% effectiveness in a trial published in JAMA Network Open (2021) and was featured on ABC's Shark Tank, resulting in an investment deal with Mark Cuban. His other patents include an induced-hypothermia machine calibrator system, Deploy of Smart Naso Gastric Tube , developed with the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UT Austin, UT San Antonio  and a method for treating anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis.

He serves as Section Editor for Neurocritical Care at the Journal of Clinical Medicine and on the editorial board of Clinical Neurosurgery and Neurology (Elsevier),  BMC Neurology by Springer Nature, and has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, with 2,929 citations, an h-index of 30, and an i10-index of 78 (Google Scholar, as of August 2026).