Introduction: stroke is a life-threatening disease characterized by rapidly developing clinical signs of focal or global disturbance of cerebral function and irreversible brain injury. oxidative stress is believed to contribute to neuronal damage induced by cerebral ischemia/reperfusion (i/r) injury. natural products (specially the medicinal plants) probably represent an ideal source to develop safe and effective agents for management of stroke. the present study is designed to investigate the possible cerebroprotective effect of ethanolic extract of alstonia scholaris linn. on ischemia/reperfusion-induced cerebral injury. materials and methods: global cerebral ischemia was induced by bilateral common carotid artery (bcca) occlusion for 30 min followed by reperfusion for 60 min on wistar albino rats. the levels of lipid peroxidation (lpo) and nitric oxide (no) were estimated as a measure of oxidative stress markers. enzymatic and non-enzymatic levels were estimated along with cerebral infarction area and histopathological studies. results: pretreatment with ethanolic extract of alstonia scholaris (eeas) (100 mg/kg, 200 mg/kg and 400 mg/kg) showed neuroprotective activity by significant decrease in lpo and no while increase in the superoxide dismutase (sod), catalase (cat), glutathione (gsh) and total thiols levels as compared to ischemia/reperfusion group. eeas treated groups showed marked reduction in cerebral infarction as compared to i/r group. histopathological study revealed reversal of brain damage in eeas treated group as compared to i/r group. conclusions: the results suggest that alstonia scholaris has potent neuroprotective activity against global cerebral ischemia/reperfusion-induced cerebral injury and is mediated through its free radical scavenging activity. keywords: alstonia scholaris, cerebral injury, ischemia/reperfusion, neuroprotection, oxidative stress.