Zachary L. Hickman, MD, is a board-certified neurosurgeon and Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery in the Department of Neurosurgery at the Mount Sinai Health System and Director of the Neurosurgery Department at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, New York.
Dr. Hickman completed a post-graduate fellowship in neurotrauma and neurocritical care at Jackson Memorial Hospital and Ryder Trauma Center at the University of Miami Medical Center, under the directorship of M. Ross Bullock, MD, PhD. Dr. Hickman obtained his MD at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons in New York City and completed his neurosurgery residency at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center.
Dr. Hickman’s clinical and research interests include traumatic brain and spine injury, neurosurgical emergencies and neurocritical care, intracranial multimodality monitoring, patient-oriented outcomes research, international neurosurgery, and quality improvement.
Dr. Hickman has been published in a variety of scholarly peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Neurosurgery, Neurosurgery, Neurocritical Care, Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, and Stroke.
Jamie S. Ullman, MD, FACS, joined Northwell Health in 2013 as director of neurotrauma at the Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery at North Shore University Hospital. She brings 25 years of specialized expertise in the surgical management of head and spinal cord injuries, as well as acute neurological conditions such as stroke, cerebral hemorrhage, hydrocephalus and brain tumors.
A founding member of the Northwell Health Concussion Program, Dr. Ullman leads a team of experts in traumatic brain injury. She also works closely with the neurocritical care team in the Neurosurgery Intensive Care Unit at North Shore University Hospital to deliver comprehensive neurological services to the community.
Fully committed to being accessible for her patients, Dr. Ullman is always there to answer questions and address any concerns with kindness and compassion. She takes the time to go over every aspect of care, whether it s reviewing diagnostic films or explaining the thorough details of a procedure.
Research is also important to Dr. Ullman. She is actively involved in various neurosurgical clinical trials and studies including intracranial pressure monitoring and minimally invasive removal of blood clots in strokes. Her work has been highlighted in more than 60 medical publications.
A recognized leader in her field, Dr. Ullman has received numerous awards from national organizations, including the Distinguished Service Award from the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. She was also nominated for Northwell s President s Award, recognized for her leadership in elevating the neurotrauma program at North Shore University Hospital, the first trauma center in downstate New York to receive level I verification from the American College of Surgeons.
Dr. Ullman received her medical training from Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey. She completed a residency in neurosurgery and fellowship in neurosurgery critical care at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and an additional fellowship in neurotrauma at the Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
After completing her training, Dr. Ullman continued to pursue her passion for education. She has held faculty and leadership roles throughout her career, and currently serves as professor of neurosurgery at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. As a core faculty member of Northwell s neurosurgery residency program, she is committed to training the future leaders of brain surgery.
Dr. Ullman currently serves on the New York state trauma and advisory committees, and was the first woman to serve as an officer and vice president of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. She also previously served as chair of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons Section on Neurotrauma and Critical Care. Dr. Ullman has been recognized as one of Castle Connolly s Top Doctors .
Randy Bell graduated from the University of Arizona College of Medicine and began residency at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, MD in 2002 shortly before the initiation of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He graduated from residency in 2009 and proceeded to a cerebrovascular and endovascular fellowship at the Washington Hospital Center in Washington, DC. He was then stationed in Okinawa, Japan, and returned in 2011 to Walter Reed as a staff neurosurgeon. He deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan as the sole neurosurgeon for southern Afghanistan in 2013, caring for numerous closed and penetrating head injured patients.
He returned to Walter Reed and became the Chief of Neurosurgery at Walter Reed and the Uniformed Services University in 2017. He retired from active duty as a Navy Captain in 2022 and is now a staff neurosurgeon providing rural stroke care at the Avera Mckennan Hospital and University Health Center in Sioux Falls, SD.
Dr. Bell has published nearly 70 articles on the care of patients with severe traumatic brain injury, with a specific focus on penetrating brain injury and penetrating cerebrovascular injury. He currently leads the international effort to create the 2nd edition Penetrating Head Injury Guidelines in conjunction with the Brain Trauma Foundation and United States Military.
Dr. Parr received both her undergraduate degree and medical degree from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. She then completed her PhD studies in neural stem cell transplantation for spinal cord injury during neurosurgical residency at the University of Toronto. During this time she was affiliated with the Institute of Medical Science and the Clinical Investigator Program. She then received further training in complex spine at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital, Miami, FL. After her training, Dr. Parr came to University of Minnesota where she is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery, as well as the Medical Director of both Spinal Neurosurgery and Neurotrauma, and Principal Investigator of the Parr Lab at the Stem Cell Institute. She is Past-Chair of both the Minnesota Neurosurgical Society and the Section for Women in Neurosurgery, a Joint Section of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons.
Dr. Parr is a Board Certified Neurosurgeon and interested in finding new therapies for spinal cord injury. She is also a faculty member in the Graduate Program in Neuroscience and the Stem Cell Institute. Dr. Parr’s research centers on transplanting neural stem cells grown from a patient’s own skin into the injured spinal cord. She has an active translational research laboratory and is interested in examining mechanisms of functional recovery using techniques such as histology and immunohistochemistry, cell culture, optogenetics, and animal modeling.
Bio coming soon!
Jill Braselton, RN, CPSTI, is the Executive Director of the ThinkFirst Foundation, a national injury prevention educational organization, founded by neurosurgeons, with a focus on brain, spinal cord, and other traumatic injury prevention. ThinkFirst programs are designed to reduce injury by helping the participant understand the importance of using your mind to protect your body. Jill served as the ThinkFirst Illinois State Chapter Director and Injury Prevention Coordinator for a large health system in the suburbs of Chicago prior to her current role. She helped develop and implement several of the national ThinkFirst programs including ThinkFirst For Youth, geared toward 4th-8th grade students, where she presented ThinkFirst assemblies/classroom presentations to over 6,000 students each year. She also presented bi-weekly ThinkFirst For Your Baby car seat programs targeting parents of young children with Child Passenger Safety education. In addition, she is a nurse with a background in Maternal/Child health and a Certified Child Passenger Safety Technician Instructor. She created and managed the Boost Illinois program at Central DuPage Hospital for 14 years, educating parents on correct car seat use and distributing over 500 car seats annually to families in need. She lives in Illinois with her husband and enjoys traveling and spending time with her family.
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Dr. Im completed his physical medicine and rehabilitation residency at NYU School of Medicine/Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine and subsequently did a fellowship in brain injury rehabilitation medicine at UMDNJ/Johnson Rehabilitation Institute. Upon finishing his fellowship, Dr. Im returned to Bellevue Hospital specifically with an interest to improve the brain injury rehabilitation program for the underserved public city hospital population. During his five years at Bellevue, Dr. Im became the director of the brain injury rehabilitation program. Currently, Dr. Im is director of brain injury rehabilitation at Rusk Rehabilitation where he continues to treat inpatients. He is also co-director of the TBI model systems project at Rusk Rehabilitation and Bellevue Hospital, co-director of the NYU Concussion Center, and the fellowship director for the NYU Rusk Rehabilitation brain injury medicine fellowship.
Dr. Lin is a clinical pharmacy specialist practicing in the Neurosurgical Critical Care Unit (NSCU). She received her PharmD from the Arnold & Marie Schwartz College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at LIU. She completed an ASHP-accredited PGY-1 pharmacy residency at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, as well as a PGY-2 internal medicine residency at University Pittsburgh Medical Center, Presbyterian Shadyside. Dr. Lin is an active member within Long Island Society of Health-System Pharmacists (LISHP).
Dr. Lin currently maintains a clinical pharmacy practice in the Neurosurgical Critical Care Unit (NSCU) and Neurology/Stroke Unit at North Shore University Hospital.
Dr Roxanne Todor, MD, FAANS, FACS is the Director of Neurosurgery at Jacobi Medical Center. Dr. Todor completed a fellowship in cerebrovascular surgery at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation after completing Neurosurgical Residency at New York Medical College. She obtained her MD at SUNY Downstate Medical Center where she also completed 2 years of general surgical residency.
Dr Todor’s clinical and research interests focus on neurotrauma, especially moderate and severe traumatic brain injury in adults and children. She is part of a multidisciplinary team that manages craniofacial trauma and activity participates in quality improvement. She actively participates in neurotrauma education and has presented at local and national conferences.
Bio coming soon!
Bio coming soon!
Kristen Dams-O’Connor, Ph.D. is Jack Nash Professor and Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Rehabilitation and Human Performance at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) in New York, NY. She serves as Director of the Brain Injury Research Center (BIRC) of Mount Sinai and is a Professor of Neurology at ISMMS. Her multidisciplinary research program aims to identify mechanisms, risk, and protective factors to improve long-term outcomes in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and repetitive head trauma sustained through sports participation, military service, and intimate partner violence. She leads the Late Effects of TBI (LETBI) project, a longitudinal prospective TBI brain donor program that aims to characterize the clinical phenotype and postmortem pathological signatures of post-traumatic neurodegeneration and its associations with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), AD-related dementias (ADRDs), traumatic encephalopathy syndrome (TES), and underlying neuropathological processes. Her team uses modern psychometric and statistical techniques to measure individual differences in trajectories of change over time among survivors of TBI. One goal of this work is to improve diagnosis of secondary post-traumatic conditions during life so they can be treated.
She is Project Director of the New York Traumatic Brain Injury Model System of care, one of 16 centers of excellence for TBI research and clinical care in the United States. Her research is supported by federal grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute for Disability Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research, Department of Defense, Centers for Disease Control, and Patient Reported Outcomes Research Institute.
Sn. Program Manager at Northwell Health – Neurosurgery
Bio coming soon!
Dr. Margetis is a uniquely qualified neurosurgeon with dual postgraduate fellowships in Complex Spine Surgery from The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and in Pediatric Neurosurgery from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. Dr. Margetis obtained his medical degree at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Medical School in Greece. At the University of Athens, also in Greece, he earned his PhD for research related to the effects of Intrathecal Baclofen Therapy on the Central Nervous System and completed his Neurosurgery residency. He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He holds a Masters Certificate in Health Care Leadership from Cornell University. Dr. Margetis has been published in a variety of scholarly journals including the Journal of Neurosurgery, World Neurosurgery, Neuromodulation, and the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology.
Dr. Margetis practices general neurosurgery and complex spine surgery at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Morningside in Manhattan, New York.
Bio coming soon!
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