Dr Theodore H. Schwartz is the David and Ursel Barnes Endowed Professor of Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery at Weill Cornell Medical Center at New York Presbyterian Hospital, one of the busiest and most highly ranked neurosurgery centres in the world. He has published over five hundred scientific articles and chapters on neurosurgery, and has lectured around the world – from Bogotá to Vienna to Mumbai – on new, minimally invasive surgical techniques that he helped develop. He also runs a basic science laboratory devoted to epilepsy research. He studied philosophy and literature at Harvard.