WashU Welcome Functional Neurosurgeon
The Taylor Family Department of Neurosurgery at WashU Medicine is pleased to announce that Gabriel Friedman, MD, has accepted a full-time faculty position in our department. He will begin this summer as a functional neurosurgeon caring for patients with movement disorders, epilepsy, pain, and peripheral nerve conditions and a research focus on closed-loop approaches for adaptive neuromodulation.
Dr. Friedman earned his undergraduate degree from Pomona College and his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. He completed his neurosurgery residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, followed by fellowship training in Stereotactic & Functional Neurosurgery at the University of Washington.
During residency, Dr. Friedman was awarded both an NIH/NINDS R25 Research Training Program Grant and a Neurosurgery Research Education Foundation (NREF) Research Fellowship Grant, supporting his early work on biohybrid interfaces for neural prosthetic control with Dr. Hugh Herr at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His laboratory will develop decoding and stimulation approaches for closed-loop modulation of neural function. A central focus of the lab will be motor control and restoration, with the broader goal of building new circuit-based techniques for treating disabling disorders of the nervous system.
Eric C. Leuthardt, MD, MBA, Shi H. Huang Professor of Neurological Surgery, Vice-Chair of Innovation in the Department of Neurosurgery, Chief of the Division of Neurotechnology, and Professor of Neurosurgery, Neuroscience, Biomedical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, said:
“Dr. Friedman is an exceptionally well-trained functional neurosurgeon with outstanding expertise in neurotechnology and neural prosthetics. His work in developing next-generation approaches for motor restoration will significantly advance our ability to treat patients with severe neurologic injury and disease. We are thrilled to welcome him to WashU Medicine.”
Dr. Friedman’s wife, Thuy-Lan, a St. Louis native, will also be joining Washington University in St. Louis in the Division of Infectious Diseases.
We are excited to welcome Dr. Friedman to our faculty and look forward to his contributions to research, innovation, and the advancement of functional neurosurgery at WashU Medicine.
