Brad Volpi was born in Chicago and moved to the Bay Area at age 10, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley. He went back east for medical training, first to University of Connecticut for medical school, and after a rotating internship and four years as a general practitioner in the National Health Service in rural North Carolina, he returned for residency training and an epilepsy fellowship at Yale.

He fulfilled his long-term wish of returning to the Bay Area to practice Neurology in 1987.