Robert E. Gross, MD

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, has been appointed 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. Gross also will serve 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, was professor and vice chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at Emory University School of Medicine, prior to coming to RWJBarnabas Health, Rutgers Health. He holds the MBNA/Bowman Endowed Chair in Neurosurgery, is an expert in neuromodulation and employing innovative techniques that use electrical impulses to target nerves within the brain, lessening life-altering symptoms of severe disorders, including epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, depression and others. A world leader in functional neurosurgery, Dr. Gross was director of the surgical team at Emory 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.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health continuously since 2005, Dr. Gross is the principal investigator of five NIH-funded projects and is a co-investigator or site investigator on nine additional NIH and industry-supported research projects. He will bring a new R01-grant–supported research project to Rutgers that seeks to understand how current neuromodulation treatments can be improved to provide better outcomes for patients. Advancing medical knowledge of how neural stimulation works well—and doesn’t work well—has been the goal of Dr. Gross’ research for 25 years.

Cultivating physician-scientists in medicine is a mission Dr. Gross focused on early in his career.

In addition to his clinical and research roles at Emory, Dr. Gross is director of the MD/PhD program, overseeing 95 medical students who also are pursuing a doctorate in research. He has or is also mentoring 22 neurosurgery fellows, 13 post-doctoral research fellows and 13 doctoral students. He also has mentored countless undergraduate students and nearly two dozen high school students in research projects.

Dr. Gross earned a bachelor’s degree in neural science with honors from Brown University, in Providence, R.I., and a doctorate in molecular pharmacology and medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. He completed residency in neurological surgery at Albert Einstein before conducting a fellowship in functional and stereotactic neurosurgery at the University of Toronto and The Toronto Hospital, in Ontario, Canada, following which he completed a visiting fellowship in epilepsy surgery at Yale University and Yale/New Haven Hospital in Connecticut.

A frequent invited lecturer on neuromodulation and epilepsy surgery, Dr. Gross has served as president of the American Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery and was a member of the committee to establish consensus guidelines on deep brain stimulation, jointly sponsored by the Movement Disorders Society and American Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery. He has served on the editorial board of Neurosurgery, where he was section editor for stereotactic and functional neurosurgery; Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery; PLoS One; and Frontiers in Surgery; is an active manuscript reviewer for nearly three dozen scientific journals; and is a member of more than a dozen professional societies related to neurosurgery, epilepsy, bioengineering and movement disorders.

Dr. Gross started his tenure as chair of neurosurgery at Rutgers Health and as senior vice president for neurosurgical services at RWJBarnabas Health on November 6, 2023.