Robert E. Gross, MD, PhD

Chair, Department of Neurosurgery, RWJMS & NJMS
Senior Vice President of Neurosurgical Services, Neuroscience Service-line, RWJBH
Professor, Department of Neurosurgery, RWJMS & NJMS
 

Robert E. Gross, MD, PhD, a renowned neurosurgeon who has led collaborative teams of clinician-scientists in the pursuit of improving the quality of life for patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders, serves as joint chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and New Jersey Medical School, both part of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Dr. Gross also serves as the senior vice president for neurosurgical services at RWJBarnabas Health, helping effect a transformational change in the provision of neurosurgical care throughout the health system and Rutgers Health.

Dr. Gross, who is originally from Long Island, NY, earned a bachelor’s degree in neural science with honors from Brown University followed by his MD and a PhD in molecular pharmacology from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. He completed residency in neurological surgery at Albert Einstein/Montefiore followed by a fellowship in functional and stereotactic neurosurgery at the University of Toronto and a visiting fellowship in epilepsy surgery at Yale/New Haven Hospital before assuming his first faculty position at University of Utah School of Medicine. Dr. Gross then moved to Emory University School of Medicine where he rose to professor and vice-chair and held the MBNA/Bowman Endowed Chair in Neurological Surgery and directed their functional and stereotactic neurosurgery division. As a long-standing surgeon-scientist with an active NIH funded research program and mentor of many medical, graduate and other students, residents, and post-doctoral fellows, Dr. Gross also rose to serve as director of their NIH-funded medical scientist (MD/PhD) training program. In recognition of his lifetime of dedication to mentoring, Dr. Gross was a recent recipient of the Medical Student Teaching Award granted by the Society for Neurological Surgery.

At Emory, Dr. Gross applied his expertise in neuromodulation by employing innovative techniques that use electrical impulses to target nerves within the brain, lessening life-altering symptoms of severe disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, depression and other neurological disorders. He was principal investigator in several clinical trials establishing the effectiveness of deep brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson’s disease and tremor as well as exploring new technologies including cell and gene therapy. Dr. Gross directed the surgical team that was at the forefront of developing deep brain stimulation as a treatment for drug-resistant seizures in epilepsy, reducing the frequency and severity of seizures for patients with epilepsy, as well as stereotactic laser ablation which has added a frequently used minimally invasive alternative to open surgery for epilepsy. He has also played a key role in the development of DBS for psychiatric disorders such as depression.

Dr. Gross is a frequently invited national and international lecturer and course director in functional neurosurgery and is a member of more than a dozen professional societies related to neurosurgery, epilepsy, biomedical engineering and movement disorders, in which he has served on or chaired numerous committees to advance surgical treatments. He rose to serve as president of the American Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery, advancing the science of the treatment of neurological disorders as well as consensus guidelines and advocacy for patients. He has also served on the editorial board of Neurosurgery, PLoS One, and Frontiers in Surgery and is an active manuscript reviewer for nearly three dozen scientific journals.

One of Dr. Gross’s many accomplishments at Emory was to drive forward innovation. As the founder and director of the Emory Neuromodulation Technology Innovation Center (ENTICe), Dr. Gross engaged faculty in multiple disciplines across two universities to collaborate on developing life-changing biomedical technology. Upon joining Rutgers, Dr. Gross established the NeuroTechnology Innovation

Center (NTICe) to engage colleagues at Rutgers and RWJBarnabas Health toward the same mission. In his words NTICe represents “…a model of collisions, where you are intentionally bringing multidisciplinary knowledge together and curating ideas through working groups to generate a new treatment for patients. The alignment of the academic mission at Rutgers with the clinical mission of RWJBarnabas Health results in a strong academic health system that allows for enhancing the synergies between surgeon scientists and scientists in a lab to guide and direct the research. Similarly, a public research university like Rutgers offers unlimited potential for bringing together teams of clinicians who understand the barriers in solving medical treatment dilemmas with engineers who can find solutions to generate medical advancements.”

Funded by the National Institutes of Health continuously since 2005, Dr. Gross has been the principal investigator of numerous NIH-funded projects and principal or co-investigator of many NIH- and industry-funded clinical trials. He continues this work at Rutgers RWJ Medical School where he currently has 2 R01-grant–supported research projects that seek to understand how current neuromodulation treatments can be improved to provide better outcomes for patients. He is also site principal investigator of 2 clinical trials, exploring DBS for major depression and gene therapy for temporal lobe epilepsy. Advancing the technologies of neural stimulation and gene and cell therapy for neurological and psychiatric disorders has been the goal of Dr. Gross’s research for 25 years.

Dr. Gross came to Rutgers and RWJBarnabas Health to drive advancements in clinical care and the training of residents, medical students and fellows across our entire health system. Cultivating, training and mentoring neurosurgeon trainees, including neurosurgeon-scientists, is a mission Dr. Gross has focused on throughout his career, which he will continue to do at Rutgers. “Rutgers has the hallmark of a strong academic neurosurgery program where surgeons, surgeon-scientists and our associated specialties have the unique opportunity of using their experience as clinicians who see patients daily to connect and then determine the direction of scientific and clinical investigations specifically to fill treatment gaps,” says Dr. Gross. “Partnering their expertise with scientists, engineers, including fellows and students, leads to innovative studies and new knowledge to help find resolutions to the dilemmas in care that we are unable to fix currently.”