This is Dr. Dave Lunsford at the University of Pittsburgh. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the Van Wagenen Fellowship, sponsored by the NREF of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. The AANS Van Wagenen Fellowship is a fully funded fellowship of $120,000 stipend, plus $6,000 family expenses and $15,000 that goes to the accepting institution where the individual will do this fellowship training. In addition, it provides $5,000 for health insurance as well. In 2021, the next Van Wagenen Fellow will be Ezekiel Goldschmidt, who happens to be finishing training here at the University of Pittsburgh. The resident applicants are eligible if they come from accredited programs in the United States, Canada, or Mexico. Generally, the fellowship site is always spent one year outside of North America with most people selecting centers in Europe. It's done within two years after completing their residency training. The resident applicants are selected by a fellowship committee that the AANS sponsors. Who was Van Wagenen? He was an individual born in upstate New York in the turn of the century. He went to Cornell and Harvard, eventually trained with Herbie Cushing at the Brigham. He then, as was typical in that era, did additional fellowship training in Germany, having actually received underwriting support from Cushing himself. He studied in Munich and in Brasov, and he developed a major interest in epilepsy, eventually collaborating with Wilder Penfield. He eventually became the chief of neurosurgery at the University of Rochester in New York. In fact, Van Wagenen served as the first president of the Harvey Cushing Society, which eventually became the AANS. Van Wagenen award winners have come from many academic medical centers, and cumulatively they have published more than 4,500 academic publications, leading eventually to 18 recipients becoming department chairs. The impact factors of the work performed by these individuals range from 22 to 104, well over what many Nobel Prize winners have. Milestone publications have been put out for stereotactic surgery, radiosurgery, pediatrics, epilepsy, trauma, and oncology over these years. The Van Wagenen sites where people have done their training have been, as you see here, ranging for number one in the United Kingdom, but other European sites, and seven others went to various other centers outside of Europe. Typically, this is an academic position leading to academic leadership in the United States, and 11 have become department chairs, 13 are professors in neurosurgery, and six others are in clinical practice. I myself selected to do the fellowship in 1980 at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm under the direction of, at that time, Lars Rexel, who had just stepped down as the professor, and Eric Olaf Backlund, one of his main disciples, who were working on a variety of stereotactic and other image-guided techniques. I learned a variety of different types of technologies and treatment options for the things that I was interested in related to stereotactic surgery, image-guided surgery, functional neurosurgery, visceral rhizotomy for trigeminal neuralgia, and, of course, radiosurgery for the treatment of a wide variety of clinical conditions using the gamma knife. In my view, this was the best year of my professional career, like doing a sabbatical before starting your first academic job. I was able to decompress from my very busy chief residency year. I focused on a part of neurosurgery where that was of most interest to me. I learned new innovative techniques and technologies that modify neurosurgery. Some people do clinical work, others do purely research. During that time, I was able to re-solidify my role as both a spouse and a father. I studied a new culture, a new language, and I was able to work with some profoundly creative and innovative 20th-century neurosurgeons. In addition, I was able to collaborate on some additional technical innovations using image guidance. I made lifelong personal and professional friends. So that culminated some 36 years later in my receiving the Herbert Oliva Crono Award in Stockholm from the Karolinska Institute. And here are some of my colleagues many years later with whom I worked when I was in Stockholm during that time. There are a number of important academic scholarships in our world. Of course, the Rhodes Scholars are well known. The Fulbright Scholars for Foreign Travel established by Senator Fulbright. And I believe that the Van Wagenen Fellowship establishes the level of scholarship that is most important for the field of neurosurgery. It is, in fact, a fantastic way to jumpstart your career, providing the recipient with huge energy to begin this next phase of their real professional career in neurosurgery and leading on to academic excellence in most of the recipients becoming department chairs or professors in the field of neurosurgery. Thanks for listening to this discussion of the William P. Van Wagenen Fellowship. We will consider an application for this very important scholarly activity. Thank you.

Van Wagenen Fellowship

NREF

American Association of Neurological Surgeons

neurosurgery

residency training