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P. David Adelson, MD

Vice Chair
WVU Medicine Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute
Morgantown, West Virginia, United States

P. DAVID ADELSON, MD, FAAP, FACS, FAANS is Vice Chair of the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University School of Medicine and the Executive Director of the WVU Medicine Children's Neuroscience Center. He is also a Professor of Neurosurgery at WVU. He was previously the Director of Barrow Neurological Institute at Phoenix Children's Hospital, the Diane and Bruce Halle Endowed Chair for Children’s Neurosciences and Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Phoenix Children's Hospital (PCH). Receiving his undergraduate and medical degrees from Columbia University, he completed his neurosurgical residency at UCLA in 1993. He then entered into a pediatric neurosurgery fellowship at Children's Hospital of Boston and Harvard Medical School, finishing in 1994 then joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. During his tenure there from 1994-2008, he rose through the academic ranks to Professor of Neurosurgery and was named the A. Leland Albright Endowed Professorship of Neurosurgery/Pediatric Neurosurgery at the University of Pittsburgh and Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Adelson then moved to Arizona, joining Phoenix Children's Hospital in 2009, where he began to build the Children's Neuroscience Institute and assumed the leadership of the renamed, Barrow Neurological Institute at Phoenix Children's Hospital. Under his leadership, Barrow at PCH became one of the top pediatric neuroscience programs in the country and the most comprehensive state-of-the-art multi-disciplinary neuroscience institute for children in the Southwest.
Dr. Adelson is a globally recognized expert in pediatric brain, spine/ spinal cord, and peripheral nerve injury, including acute clinical management of traumatically brain injured children as well as regenerative and restorative neuroscience. His clinical specialties additionally include pediatric epilepsy surgery, brachial plexus and peripheral nerve, neurovascular, and brain tumors. He remains active in both clinical and translational laboratory research, leading both Phase II and Phase III clinical trials on hypothermia following severe traumatic brain injury. More recently, he has collaborated in mechanisms of epilepsy, neural recovery, neurocritical care and neural machine interfaces. His research has resulted in his authoring more than 275 publications in refereed journals, over 45 book chapter, and edited 8 books, including Principles and Practice of Pediatric Neurosurgery, the authoritative textbook in the field of pediatric neurosurgery, now in its 3rd Edition.
Dr. Adelson has been the recipient of multiple awards. In 2016, he was the first pediatric neurosurgeon to be awarded the highly coveted Herbert Olivecrona Award, the “Nobel Prize of Neurosurgery”, by the Department of Clinical Neurosciences/Neurosurgery at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden for his vast clinical and research contributions to the field of pediatric neurosurgery and significant work in pediatric neurotrauma and neuroscience research. In 2008-09, Dr. Adelson served as President for the Congress of Neurological Surgeons and currently is on the Board of Directors of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons as Director at Large. He has been active internationally supporting international neurosurgical education with the World Federation of Neurological Surgeons (WFNS), European Association of Neurosurgical Societies, and a collaborative neurotrauma fellowship based out of Latin American.

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