Robert F. Spetzler

Dr. Spetzler is President and Chief Executive Officer of Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, where he has been Director since 1986 and has held the J. N. Harber Chair of Neurological Surgery since first joining the staff in 1983. Under his guidance and focus on education, research, and patient care, Barrow Neurological Institute has become one of the top neuroscience centers and the largest neurosurgical center in the United States, with the largest neurosurgical residency training program in the country.

His neurosurgical work focuses on vascular neurosurgery and skull base surgery to treat aneurysms, arteriovenous malformations (AVMs), and cavernous malformations. He has developed more effective and safer neurosurgical approaches to deep areas of the brain. During his extensive surgical practice, he has clipped more than 6,400 aneurysms, and he has developed theories on normal perfusion pressure breakthrough and how AVM size reveals the potential for rupture. He codeveloped a heuristic grading system (the Spetzler-Martin grading scale) for estimating the risk of open neurosurgery for AVMs.

Dr. Spetzler is a sought-after presenter at national and international neurosurgical conferences. He has edited or coedited more than 20 books and neurosurgical atlases, has published more than 700 articles in peer-reviewed academic medical journals, and has coauthored more than 270 book chapters. He frequently serves as a peer reviewer of scholarly manuscripts on vascular topics. He has been editor-in-chief of the journals Operative Techniques in Neurosurgery and Skull Base: An Interdisciplinary Approach, and he has been an editorial board member, a section editor, and an advisory board member for numerous journals.

He holds chairs in Neurosurgical Education and in Neurosurgical Research at Barrow Neurological Institute, and serves as a professor and executive chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Phoenix. He also is a past president of the American Academy of Neurological Surgery and the North American Skull Base Society, and a past honorary president of the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies Foundation.