Samuel Pleasure, MD, PhD

Biography

Dr. Samuel J. Pleasure is a neurologist who specializes in caring for patients with multiple sclerosis. He also has expertise in caring for patients with epilepsy as well as years of experience in managing a variety of neurological conditions in both clinic and hospital settings. Pleasure has two main areas of inquiry for his research. He studies processes that regulate early brain development in both normal and diseased situations. He also studies autoimmune forms of meningoencephalitis, where inflammation in specific brain areas causes severe neurologic dysfunction.

Pleasure received his medical degree and a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania. He was chief resident during his neurology residency at UCSF, where he then completed a research fellowship in neuroscience. Pleasure is a fellow of the American Neurological Association and a member of the American Academy of Neurology, American Epilepsy Society, Society for Neuroscience, Society for Developmental Biology and Cajal Club. He has won numerous awards for his research and has received research funding from a wide variety of private, state and federal sources. He has served in leadership roles in national organizations and in the UCSF Department of Neurology.

Pleasure is the Glenn W. Johnson, Jr. Memorial Endowed Chair in Neurology at UCSF.

BRAIN Funded Projects

This project aims to investigate biological mechanisms underlying acute neuropsychiatric decline in children, including those with autism, with particular attention to the role of neural autoantibodies and disrupted vitamin B12 transport into the brain.

Selected Publications

Lun, M.P., Ngo, T.T., Pleasure, S.J. et al. Exploratory autoantibody profiling in autism spectrum disorder. medRxiv (2025).

LaHue, S.C., Takegami, N., Pleasure, S.J., et al. Delirium in hospitalized COVID-19 patients is associated with dynamic changes in peripheral immune gene expression. Geroscience (2025).

Pleasure, S.J., Pleasure, S.J. Pediatric post-infectious neuroinflammatory syndromes come to the fore. Dev. Neurosci. 47 (4), 229-230 (2025).