PHILADELPHIA—Daniel Yoshor, MD, a nationally recognized neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, has been named chair of the department of Neurosurgery in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and vice president of Clinical Integration and Innovation for the University of Pennsylvania Health System. Yoshor, who will begin his new role at Penn Medicine on July 1, 2020, is currently the Marc J. Shapiro endowed professor and chair of the department of Neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Yoshor joined the faculty at Baylor in 2000 and is a professor in the departments of Neurosurgery, Neurology, and Neuroscience. He was program director for the Baylor neurosurgery residency program, one of the largest in the nation, from 2008-2016, and has served as chief of Neurosurgery at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center since 2010. He became chair of the department of Neurosurgery in 2015. Under his leadership, the department rose to No. 3 in the country in National Institutes of Health funding.
“A dynamic leader and accomplished administrator, Dr. Yoshor impressively advanced Baylor Neurosurgery over the past five years in all of its missions,” said J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD, dean of the Perelman School of Medicine and executive vice president of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. “We are grateful for Dr. Sean Grady’s vision and energetic leadership of the Neurosurgery department over the past two decades, and we look forward to the growth of this impactful department in this next phase of leadership.”
As a clinical neurosurgeon, Yoshor focuses on endoscopic pituitary and skull base surgery, as well as brain tumor and epilepsy surgery. He has one of the largest pituitary surgery practices in the nation. He also has extensive experience in clinical brain mapping and in the development and clinical implementation of novel neuro-technologies.
A well-respected scientist, Yoshor has received continuous extramural federal peer-reviewed funding since 2004. As a visual neuroscientist, he studies mechanisms of sensory processing in human visual cortex. He is working with a large team of scientists, engineers, and clinicians to develop a cortical visual prosthetic that employs brain stimulation to restore vision to the blind. Work from Yoshor’s laboratory has been published in leading scientific journals, including the Journal of Neuroscience, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, PNAS, Current Biology, and Nature Medicine. A report of some of his most recent work is currently in press for publication in the journal Cell.
In keeping with his accomplishments, Yoshor is an elected member of the American Academy of Neurological Surgery and the Society of Neurological Surgeons, and an Examiner for the American Board of Neurological Surgeons. He is also Section Editor for the journal Neurosurgery, a standing member of the NIH NST-1 Study Section, and directs a program for research education in neurosurgery that is funded by an NINDS R25 training grant.
Yoshor received a B.A. in philosophy from Yeshiva University in 1989 and graduated from medical school at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine in 1993. He completed neurosurgical residency at Baylor College of Medicine, and then a clinical fellowship in brain tumor and epilepsy surgery and brain mapping at the University of California San Francisco.
At Penn, under the leadership of M. Sean Grady, MD, the Neurosurgery department’s residency program has substantially exceeded national goals for increasing the number of women in the field. Grady has helped to enhanced the patient-care experience and established exciting new lines of research, including collaborative grants for work in traumatic brain injury and neuro-oncology. Grady will continue to serve as physician director of the Neurosciences Service Line.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
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