MANHASSET, NY-- Raj K. Narayan, MD, chairman of neurosurgery at the North Shore University Hospital and LIJ Medical Center, and director of the North Shore-LIJ Health System’s Cushing Neuroscience Institutes, was recently honored by The American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin of Queens and Long Island (AAPI-QLI). The prestigious award, presented at AAPI’s 15th Annual Gala on November 13, 2010, was conferred to Dr. Narayan in recognition of his many professional accomplishments over the course of his career.

Amit Powar, MD, of AAPI-QLI called Dr. Narayan a role model for those in the healthcare profession. Born in South India, the son of an Indian Army officer, Dr. Narayan traveled as a child with his family through many army postings in North India and the Middle East where his father was a diplomat. He obtained his medical degree from the Christian Medical College in Vellore and completed his neurosurgery residency at the Medical College of Virginia. In 1982, he embarked on a three year fellowship at the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, MD.

From 1985 to 1995, Dr. Narayan was on the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and rapidly climbed the academic ladder to become a tenured full professor. At the age of 42 he was appointed as chair of Neurosurgery at Temple University in Philadelphia. He was not only one of the youngest chairs of a neurosurgery residency program, but was also one of the first Indians to achieve this recognition. After rebuilding the Temple program, in 2002, Dr. Narayan was recruited to head the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Cincinnati. Over a period of the next seven years, he almost doubled the scope of the UC program. In September 2009, Dr. Narayan was recruited by the North Shore-LIJ Health System, where he is currently developing one of the largest and most successful neurosurgical departments in the country.

Dr. Narayan is one of the best known neurosurgeons in the United States. He is internationally recognized for his work relating to traumatic brain injury. He has published over a hundred peer-reviewed papers, over fifty book chapters and has co-edited the major textbook on head and spine injury (Neurotrauma, McGraw Hill). He has been invited as visiting professor at numerous institutions around the world and has been involved with training over fifty neurosurgeons.

About the Cushing Neuroscience Institutes (CNI)
The Cushing Neuroscience Institutes of the North Shore-LIJ Health System consist of multidisciplinary clinical and research teams that provide patients with state-of-the-art treatments for the entire spectrum of neurological diseases, including brain aneurysms, AVM’s, stroke, traumatic brain injury, movement disorders, brain and spinal cord tumors, diseases of the spine, muscle and peripheral nerves, Chiari malformation, syringomyelia, neurodegenerative diseases, pain, epilepsy, and neurological diseases of infancy and childhood.

Contact: Michelle Pipia-Stiles
516-570-4406
mpipiastil@nshs.edu