10 June 2025

Prof Gail Rosseau MD is Professor of Neurosurgery at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and Adjunct Professor of Global Neurosurgery at Barrow Neurologic Institute in Phoenix, Arizona.

Her Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh was in microvascular and cranial base surgery, which she has specialised in over a long and distinguished career. She has been elected to the leadership of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies, and the Société de Neurochirurgie de Langue Française.  

She will be delivering the prestigious Bulkley-Barry-Cooper Professorial Lecture at the King's Health Partners (KHP) Academic Surgical Grand Round on Thursday 26 June, titled Advances in Neurotechnology, in collaboration with ImpaCT Neurotech. There is still time to register for the event here. 

Ahead of the event she chatted to KHP about her advocacy work on improving global access to surgical care, and shared some inspirational advice from Kermit the Frog. 

We're excited to welcome you as the Bulkley-Barry-Cooper speaker at the upcoming Grand Round. What will you be talking about?

The title of the talk is Global Surgery 2025 - tech and advocacy pathways to a brighter future. My training is in microvascular and advanced skull-based surgical techniques. As I've gone through my career and seen the real importance of - in fact, moral obligation - to help others in our specialty, I've become increasingly involved in advocacy for access to global surgery. Surgical care for everyone, everywhere.

Around 5 billion of the 8 billion people on the planet don't have access to even emergency surgical care. My primary mission at this point is working with all those others who care about this gap, to close that gap.

What are the current challenges in neurosurgery?

I would say, broadly, they are tech and access - very apropos for the topic of this event.
In terms of tech it's very exciting - there's never been a better time to be involved in neurosurgery.

If you look at every single one of our subspecialties it is extraordinary what's happening. From using CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) techniques to perform genetic engineering on infants who have inherited diseases, to using ultrasound and blood-brain barrier disruption to dialyse the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease, or perhaps, eventually, even with chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

And there’s extraordinary work being done in brain-computer interface, which is allowing people who are paralysed to walk again. And allowing those who have paralysis of all four limbs to be able to use their thoughts to communicate in a very abstract and personally satisfying way.

So we have these wonderful possibilities, but these immediately play into the access challenges. We can do these things for a handful of patients, but we want to be able to offer everything that's available in 2025 to everyone who needs it.

It’s why I’m also involved in advocacy because two thirds of the world's population not only don't have access to this high-tech neurosurgery, but they don't have access to large scale treatments like good quality care for traumatic brain injury, which kills 20 million people a year. Just think about that. It’s an entire multi-year pandemic, three times per year, every year. We've got a lot of work to do with advocacy to transfer the tech that's currently available, or that will be soon available, to everyone who needs it.

What one surgical advance would you like to see in your lifetime?

The most important and largest impact would be for those 5 billion people to have access to surgical care. I really believe that one of the most profound changes in our era of globalisation is that we, as doctors or engineers or anyone who has a professional ethos, has acquired a second professional responsibility. In the case of physicians we have the Hippocratic Oath, our primary responsibility for millennia, which is to take the best possible care of the patient in front of us.

But in these last 30 years of globalisation I believe we've acquired a second core professional responsibility - to share our knowledge with our fellow neurosurgeons so that they in turn can help their patients the way we help our patients. And this applies equally to engineers, researchers and so forth.

Globalisation implies an additional core responsibility of sharing knowledge and expertise.

What advice would you give for any young medical students looking for a career in neurosurgery?

In May, Kermit the Frog from The Muppets gave the graduation address to the 10,000 plus graduates of the University of Maryland. They chose him because his creator, Jim Henson, and his wife are both graduates of the university. I thought it was brilliant. You have the Provost and the Chancellor of the university introducing this small little frog in a cap and gown.

And he gave a really profound speech, with three pieces of advice to the young people in the audience. The first is to find your people. Find the people whose values, work ethic, and interests resonate with yours, so that you’re part of a community who enjoy working together. No one accomplishes anything big or impactful alone.

The second is make the leap. Especially good coming from a frog, right? Trust yourself. Don't hurt other people but if you have a bold, outside-the-box idea, try it. If you're a young person try to get involved in something that you think won't be accessible to you for another two decades. Be bold in your ambition, and make the leap and try to do it.

And his third piece of advice was to make and keep connections. Keep that rudder in life, recognise that you didn't get to where you are right now without the help of family, friends, loved ones, and your community.

Maintain those relationships and be eager to make connections along the way. Not only those connections that are strategic, like going on LinkedIn and looking for people who could help your career, but also the person who just happens to be sitting next to you at a conference. Maybe even at this upcoming Grand Round. They may become an important friend or life partner in the work that you want to accomplish.

So what I've learned from Kermit the Frog - and maybe we all can - is to find your people, make the leap, and make and keep connections.

The Academic Surgical Grand Round, in collaboration with ImpaCT Neurotech, is titled Advances in Neurotechnology and is on Thursday 26 June from 5:30pm to 6:30pm. People can register online or attend in-person at the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering, London SE1 7AR. You can register for the event here.