Rafael Uribe, MD, MHS, has been awarded the 2023 Christopher Gaposchkin ’99 Research Prize in Neurological Surgery. Dr. Uribe, who is completing his fifth year of the neurosurgery residency program, was honored for “Influence of low-intensity focused ultrasound on locoregional drug delivery to the brain,” which he will present at the Society for Neuro-Oncology annual meeting in June. He is also preparing the research for publication. His co-authors include Dr. Mark Souweidane, Dr. Michael Kaplitt, and Brice Martin, PhD, a post-doctoral associate who works with Dr. Souweidane.
The research was selected after a full morning of presentations from 11 neurosurgery residents, who presented work on everything from middle meningeal artery embolization to stent-assisted coiling vs. intrasaccular device embolization to deciphering the 3D genome of pediatric brain tumors.
Resident Research Day is part of the residency graduation ritual, which also includes the Bronson Ray Lecture delivered the evening before the presentations. This year’s guest lecturer was John H. Sampson, MD, PhD, the Robert H. and Gloria Wilkins Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at Duke University. His lecture was “Scars and Medals from Several Careers in Neurosurgery: The (other) Eras Tour.”
The Gaposchkin Prize was established in 2014 in memory of Dr. Christopher Gaposchkin, who died three years after completing his neurosurgery residency at Weill Cornell in 1999. The award recognizes excellence in research by a neurosurgery resident. Previous winners have been Dr. Alexander Ramos (2022), Dr. Evan Bander (2020 and 2021), Dr. Whitney Parker (2019 and 2018), Dr. Hilarie Tomasiewicz (2017), Dr. Brenton Pennicooke (2016), and Dr. Peter Morgenstern and Dr. Dmitri Sigounas (who shared the 2015 prize).
Also at the resident graduation dinner, Dr. Joseph Carnevale was named winner of the 2023 Michael L. J. Apuzzo Resident Literature Award for Creativity and Innovation