Skip to main content
2024 AANS Annual Scientific Meeting Main banner
Back

Nicholas Theodore, MD, MS (he/him/his)

Director, Neurosurgical Spine Center; Professor of Neurosurgery
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Baltimore, Maryland, United States

NICHOLAS THEODORE, MD, FAANS, FACS
Department of Neurosurgery
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Baltimore, MD

Nicholas Theodore, MD, is the Donlin M. Long Professor and Professor of Neurosurgery, Orthopaedic Surgery, and Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the Director of the Neurological Spine Program, Co-Director of the Carnegie Center for Surgical Innovation, and Director of the Complex Spine Fellowship. He graduated from Cornell University and was the recipient of a Cornell Tradition Academic Fellowship. He graduated medical school with honors at Georgetown University and was inducted into AOA.

After interning at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Dr. Theodore was Senior General Medical Officer with the United States Marine Corps in Okinawa, Japan He spent time on the clinical service at the NIH working with Dr. Edward Oldfield and completed his neurosurgical residency and fellowship under the direction of Drs. Robert Spetzler and Volker Sonntag, respectively, at the Barrow Neurological Institute (BNI). He then went on to serve as Chief of the Division of Neurosurgery at Naval Medical Center San Diego, overseeing the largest neurosurgery complement in the Navy.

In 2003, he became the Director of the Neurotrauma Program and Associate Director of the Neurosurgery Residency Program at the Barrow Neurological Institute. From 2009 to 2016, he was Chief of the Spine Section and Director of the Complex Spine Fellowship at the BNI.

His areas of interest include brain and spinal cord injury, minimally invasive surgery, robotics, and personalized medicine. He has authored over 280 scientific publications and has been the recipient of many research awards, including the Tasker, Mayfield, and NASS Awards. He has received several grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense.

In 2010, with Neil Crawford, PhD, he founded Excelsius Surgical, a robotics company which was sold to Globus Medical in 2013. The technology associated with this venture lead to the first real-time image-guided surgical robot for spine surgery and was the most successful launch of a surgical robot in medical device history.

He is active in injury prevention and has been involved with ThinkFirst for many years, serving as both the Medical Director and National President of the Board of Directors. In 2018, he was appointed Chairman of the National Football League’s Head Neck and Spine Committee.

In 2020, Dr. Theodore was awarded a five-year $13.48 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a principal investigator in the Bridging the Gap Plus (BG+) program to develop cutting-edge implantable sensors and devices for the diagnosis and management of acute spinal cord injury. He has been happily married to his wife Effie for 28 years and has raised two sons, both of whom rowed heavyweight varsity crew in college. Costa graduated from Cornell University in 2020 and is attending law school at Georgeotown. John is a graduate of Columbia University and is doing medical research.

Disclosure(s): Globus Medical: Consultant (Ongoing), Royalty Recipient (Ongoing), Stock Shareholder (excluding mutual funds) (Ongoing); Harvard MedTech: Advisor (Ongoing), Consultant (Ongoing)

Presentation(s):