Newswise — SCHAUMBURG, Ill., September 26, 2016 — The Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS), the global leader in neurosurgical education, announced the 2016-17 CNS Innovation Fellowship recipients during the opening General Scientific Session at the 2016 CNS Annual Meeting in San Diego. Granted through NICO Corporation, OsteoMed, and Synaptive, the CNS Innovation Fellowship supports future neurosurgical educators in pursuit of new training modalities, including the development of neurosurgical simulators, novel web-based technologies, or other surgical training innovations.
“The CNS Innovation Fellowship is essential for the advancement of neurosurgery and emblematic of our commitment to education, innovation, and the future of our specialty,” said Dr. Ricardo J. Komotar, MD, CNS Fellowship Committee Chair. The fellowship is appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, and is open to all neurosurgeons and residents at any stage of their career. The fellow will spend 12 months under the direction of a specific sponsor on a defined project as relevant to training. The 2016-17 recipients are as follows:
Jordan Amadio, MDDr. Amadio is chief resident in neurosurgery at Emory University and Founding Partner of NeuroLaunch, the global neuroscience venture accelerator. After receiving an honors degree in physics at Princeton, where he was a Goldwater Scholar and winner of the Kusaka Memorial Prize in Physics, he earned his MD from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard-M.I.T. Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He was among the first cohort of physicians to graduate with a concurrent MBA (with Distinction) from Harvard Business School, where he studied health care management. Since 2012 he has served as editorial fellow at Neurosurgery, the official journal of the CNS. He remains active as a senior design adviser in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech, where he has mentored numerous undergraduate thesis projects. His research interests span clinical neurosurgery, surgical ethics, and bioengineering innovation. When not at the hospital, his humanitarian activities have included neurosurgical mission work in rural Haiti and service on the boards of several nonprofit organizations, including the National Monuments Foundation.
Kimon Bekelis, MDDr. Bekelis is currently the cerebrovascular/endovascular fellow at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, and is also an instructor of health policy at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. After graduating summa cum laude from the University of Athens Medical School he spent a year as a postdoctoral research fellow in neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, focusing on observational studies. Subsequently, he completed his residency training in neurosurgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. He has lead several projects focusing on outcome predictive modeling, resource utilization, regional disparities, diffusion of innovation, intensity of care, workforce allocation, medicolegal issues, shared-decision making, and cost. He has developed two software applications for mobile platforms on risk and cost prediction for a variety of surgical procedures. Dr. Bekelis recently led the research team that produced the Dartmouth Atlas report on the diffusion of novel cerebral aneurysm treatments. He also directed the creation of an interactive online platform that allows the comparison of diffusion of health care technology metrics, and facilitates the collaboration of multiple researchers. In the last few years, he has received several national and international awards including the Dandy Award, the Scoville award, the Robert Florin award, and the Stroke care in emergency medicine award. Dr. Bekelis has been a member of numerous committees in organized neurosurgery, focusing on quality improvement, national guideline review and development, the national neurosurgery outcomes registry, and the Washington Committee. He was most recently elected as the 2016 American College of Surgeons Health Policy Scholar.
Cameron M. McDougall, MDOriginally from rural Saskatchewan, Dr. McDougall studied physiology before attending medical school at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, earning his MD in 2008. During this time, he worked with Dr. Daryl Fourney in the Division of Neurosurgery investigating neural networks. He completed a research internship with Dr. Michael Tymianski at the University of Toronto investigating surgical outcomes in trigeminal neuralgia. Under the mentorship of Dr. J. Max Findlay, he completed his neurosurgical residency at the University of Alberta in 2015. With a focus on AVM animal models, Dr. McDougall concurrently completed a one-year enfolded research fellowship under the supervision of Drs. Michael Lawton and Hua Su at the University of San Francisco Center for Cerebrovascular Research. He is currently in his second year of a three-year combined endovascular/open cerebrovascular neurosurgery fellowship at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas under the tutelage of Drs. Babu G. Welch and H. Hunt Batjer. In 2016, he was awarded a combined grant from the Joe Niekro Foundation and the Society for Neurointerventional Surgery to investigate a novel animal AVM model at UT Southwestern.
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About the Congress of Neurological Surgeons The Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) is the largest neurosurgical society in the world and the global leader in neurosurgical education, serving to promote health by advancing neurosurgery worldwide through innovation and excellence in education. With more than 8,800 members worldwide, the CNS provides global leadership in neurosurgery by inspiring and facilitating scientific discovery and its translation into clinical practice. The Congress of Neurological Surgeons maintains the vitality of the profession through volunteer efforts of its members and the development of leadership in service to the public, to colleagues in other disciplines, and to neurosurgeons throughout the world in all stages of their professional lives. For more information, visit cns.org.
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