Meet Dr. Gordon Baltuch, Co-Chief of Functional Neurosurgery

Gordon Baltuch MD, PhD, FACS, FRCS(C) is the Co-Chief of Functional Neurosurgery Division at Columbia Neurosurgery. Dr. Baltuch specializes in the surgical treatment of movement disorders and was previously director of the Penn Center for Functional and Restorative Neurosurgery and professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, where he had been a faculty member since 1996.

Dr. Baltuch was one of the first neurosurgeons in the United States to use deep brain stimulation to reduce tremor and other motor symptoms in people with Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders. After training in Montreal, Switzerland, and France, Dr. Baltuch moved to Penn to develop one of the first deep brain stimulation programs in the United States. He has treated more than 1,600 patients using the procedure, making him one of the most experienced neurosurgeons in functional neurosurgery. He also pioneered the use of the technology to treat epilepsy, depression, and Alzheimer’s disease.

More recently, Dr. Baltuch also became a pioneer in the use of focused ultrasound, a nonsurgical procedure approved in 2016 to treat essential tremor. Since 2017, he has successfully performed hundreds of these procedures and developed Penn’s focused ultrasound program into one of the largest such practices in the country.