For over a century, the University of Pennsylvania has been one of the nation’s leading centers for neurosurgery. Penn was a birthplace for the field under the leadership of Dr. Charles Harrison Frazier (1870-1936), one of neurosurgery’s founding fathers. While we embrace our illustrious past, Penn Neurosurgery is a department that is squarely focused on the future, a department of neurosurgery reborn to embrace sub-specialization, innovation, and technology.
Over the past two years, we have embarked on a comprehensive restructuring of our entire department. Our guiding principle has been the cultivation of focused expertise. We have transitioned our culture to one of deep sub-specialization and we now function as a team of highly-focused clinicians and researchers who specialize in specific areas within neurosurgery. It has been my experience that when we concentrate our efforts—and defer appropriately to our expert colleagues—the result is an environment that encourages and enables talented people to do great things, and a program that delivers the very highest levels of patient care and innovation.
To that end, in 2020 the department established four new divisions: cerebrovascular and neurointerventional surgery, functional and stereotactic neurosurgery, neurosurgical oncology, and spine and peripheral nerve surgery. Each division is headed by a national leader in the field and is populated by a team of highly-focused clinicians and researchers who specialize in unique areas with the division’s mission.
We are fortunate to be a part of Penn Medicine, the seamless combination of an outstanding medical school in a world-class research university with an extraordinary health system. Our health system includes three academic medical centers in Philadelphia (Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP), Pennsylvania Hospital, and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center), three regional medical centers in surrounding communities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as well as numerous clinics, outpatient centers, and affiliated hospitals, including one of the premier pediatric institutions in the world, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. And we are expanding, with impressive construction projects recently completed or underway, including the magnificent new HUP Pavilion. This state-of-the-art 1.5 million square foot, 17-story facility serves as the home for Penn Neurosurgery in our flagship hospital. It features brand new neurosurgical patient care units and 10 new neurosurgical operating rooms, including the latest endovascular, endoscopic, minimally invasive, and intraoperative MRI technologies.
Simply stated, there is no institution better positioned to forge the future of neurosurgery than Penn. The level of clinical neurosurgery here is simply terrific, and our subspecialty experts are constantly introducing new innovations to further improve patient care. The Department’s research programs now rank in the top 10 in the nation in NIH funding and are rapidly growing in scope and excellence. And our neurosurgery residency and fellowship training programs are among the best in the world. Most importantly, our department is imbued with the wonderful Penn culture of collaboration, tolerance, and respect for others, and is filled with talented people from diverse backgrounds. It is a tremendous privilege for us to work together, to study the complexities of the brain or spine, and to have patients place their lives in our hands. I am grateful to be a part of Penn Neurosurgery and I am energized to build on the existing level of excellence.
Daniel Yoshor, MD
Chair, Department of Neurosurgery
Vice President, Clinical Integration and Innovation