Professor Jeffrey V. Rosenfeld

Jeffrey V. Rosenfeld, Ph.D., MD, AC, OBE, FTSE, FAHMS, FAAN is Senior Neurosurgeon in the Department of Neurosurgery at The Alfred and Professor of Surgery, Monash University. He also has his own practice located in Melbourne, focused on Brain and Spine Neurosurgery.

His research interests are on improving the outcome for patients with traumatic brain injury and restoring sight to blind individuals using bionic vision, a wireless electrode interface with the brain. His interests also include brain machine interfaces, medical bionics, electrode design, neurotrauma, application of stem cell technologies to brain and spine, and military medicine applications.

Jeff has extensive experience in senior healthcare, research executive roles, and a distinguished career in the Australian Army Reserve. He is the Founding Director at Monash Institute of Medical Engineering, and has been Professor and Head of the Department of Surgery at Monash University since 2006. He was appointed Director of Neurosurgery at the Alfred Hospital in 2000.

He specializes in cerebrovascular surgery (aneurysms, arterio-venous malformations), brain tumor and skull base surgery, minimal access and neuro-endoscopic surgery, and has a particular academic and clinical interest in neurotrauma and bionic vision.

Jeff was co-Principal Investigator on the landmark Decompressive Craniectomy Study, the first multicentre randomized controlled trial of this procedure which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 2011. He is Principal Investigator on the Monash University Bionic Eye Project which was awarded $8 million by the Australian Research Council in 2009.

He has been an invited Visiting Professor in 12 countries and an invited speaker for 12 named orations and 65 international meetings. He has published over 280 peer reviewed articles (including Lancet, Lancet Neurology, and NEJM), 46 book chapters, and 2 books. Jeff has had 10,943 citations, h-index of 52, and i10-index of 164 based on Google Scholar data on January 2 2018, and has over his career been awarded $22 million of competitive grant funding including $9.9 million from the ARC and $6.62 million from the NHMRC. He has been appointed to the Editorial Board of 10 international journals and is a reviewer for 36 international journals.

Jeff was awarded the John Mitchell Crouch Fellowship of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS) for 2004, Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons (Glasgow) in 2008, Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Neurosurgeons of Thailand 2011, and Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Thailand in 2011. He was elected an inaugural Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences (FAHMS) in 2015, elected to Fellowship of the Academia Neurochirurgica Eurasiana in 2016 and elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (FTSE) in 2016. He was awarded a King James IV Professorship of the Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh for this research.

He is one of Australia’s most senior and experienced military surgeons, and has since 1984 served on eight deployments to Rwanda, Bougainville, East Timor, the Solomon Islands, and Iraq. Having earned the rank of Major General, Jeff is also a former Surgeon General of the Australian Defence Force and remains active in defense and veterans’ affairs organisations.

Jeff was awarded Officer of The Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to neurosurgery and the University of Papua New Guinea School of Medicine. In 2017, he was awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) and the United States Meritorious Service Medal for service in Iraq. In 2018, he received the International Lifetime Recognition Award of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons.

He attended Melbourne High School and graduated in medicine from the University of Melbourne in 1976. He completed general surgery training in Melbourne, and then undertook neurosurgical training. He completed post-fellowship training at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, UK and was Chief Resident in Neurological Surgery at The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Ohio, USA. On his return to Australia in 1988, he was appointed Consultant Neurosurgeon to The Royal Melbourne Hospital and the Royal Children’s Hospital and undertook a laboratory research fellowship at the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, investigating neural transplantation in mice, earning his Master of Surgery degree from the University of Melbourne in 1992. He was awarded the Syme Medal and Syme Professorship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh for this research.

Jeff is an active member of the Melbourne community and is involved in various charitable causes. He has devoted much of his time to the Australian-Aid funded Pacific Islands Project for transfer of clinical skills and knowhow to healthcare professionals in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands. He was appointed Honorary Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Papua New Guinea in 2000. As well, Jeff has been an invited visiting professor in the UK, USA, China, Japan, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Israel, and Malaysia and has developed a keen interest in developing specialist medical services, particularly neurosurgery, in the developing world.

He is still passionate about music performance. He found that the Australian Youth Orchestra (AYO) offered a fantastic introduction to advanced orchestral playing and encouraged him to aim for very high musical standards. Jeff started on recorder at age 6, which he still plays, and branched out to play all the woodwind instruments and French horn — but Clarinet is his main instrument.

Jeff plays Principal Clarinet in Corpus Medicorum, a Melbourne-based orchestra of doctors, medical students and health professionals. The Orchestra recently performed a concert series in St Petersburg with the Director of the St Petersburg Conservatorium as soloist and performed in Osaka in late 2015. Jeff has studied baroque oboe at Oberlin College, Ohio and regularly performs chamber music and jazz.

Jeff is married with three children.

Read his own self biography at The Medical Journal of Australia profile page, or at his professional profile page at Monash.

Visit his profile at Monash, his MJA page, Google Scholar page, CLINUVEL, and Australian Youth Orchestra. You can contact Jeff at HealthShare. Follow him on Twitter.