Awards & Recognitions — October 2022
Healthgrades Excellence Awards
Barrow Neurological Institute has received the 2023 Cranial Neurosurgery and Stroke Care excellence awards from Healthgrades. The organization measures hospital performance based on patient outcomes after adjusting for each patient’s risk factors.
1,000 Brain AVMS
Barrow President and CEO Michael T. Lawton, MD, performed his 1,000th brain arteriovenous malformation surgery—during AVM Awareness Month! The milestone represents Dr. Lawton’s dedication as a vascular neurosurgeon, much like batting statistics measure the career of a baseball player. If aneurysm clippings are like hits, then AVM resections are like home runs, he says.
Global Health Award
Yonas E. Geda, MD, a behavioral neurologist and neuropsychiatrist at Barrow, was recently honored with a Certificate of Appreciation from the U.S. House of Representatives for his global health work in Ethiopia. He received the award during the 14th Global Medical Education Conference. Dr. Geda is a professor in the Department of Neurology and a member of the Franke Global Neuroscience Education Center at Barrow, which is a platform for building neuroscience care and clinical education programs to reach, teach, and serve our colleagues in the developing world.
JNS: Spine Cover
The Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine selected an image from a Barrow manuscript for the cover of their October issue. Bernardo de Andrada Pereira, MD, a former complex spine surgery and spine biomechanics research fellow at Barrow, was the first author on the manuscript: “Subtle segmental angle changes of single-level lumbar fusions and adjacent-level biomechanics: cadaveric study of optically measured disc strain.” Other contributors were Dr. Piyanat Wangsawatwong, Jennifer Lehrman, Anna Sawa, Dr. Harrison Farber, Dr. Jakub Godzik, Luke O’Neill, Dr. Juan Uribe, Dr. Brian Kelly, and Dr. Jay Turner.
Brain Injury Research Grant
The Chuck Noll Foundation for Brain Injury Research has awarded a $125,000 grant to Barrow Neurological Institute and the University of Pittsburgh for their research proposal. Ruchira Jha, MD, MSc, chief of the division of neurocritical care at Barrow, is a co-principal investigator on the proposal: “Sulfonylurea Receptor-1 and Glyburide: A Single-Cell Precision Medicine Approach to Preventing Brain Swelling and Providing Neuroprotection for the Second Impact Syndrome.” This is the first time that the Pittsburgh-based organization has extended grants on a national scale.