Lawrence R. Lustig MD

Lawrence R. Lustig, MD is a Howard W. Smith Professor and Chair in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Columbia University Medical Center and New York Presbyterian Hospital. Lustig’s clinical focus is the care for disorders related to the ear and base of the skull, treating adults as well as children. Common surgeries he performs include cochlear implantation for profound deafness, tympanoplasty, and mastoidectomy for chronic ear infections, cholesteatoma due to stapedectomy for otosclerosis, and assisting the neurosurgical team to remove skull base tumors (most commonly, vestibular schwannomas). 

Dr. Lustig most recently served as Chief of the Division of Otology and Neurotology at the University of California, San Francisco, and San Francisco General Hospital. He also served as Director of the Douglas Grant Cochlear Implant Center and recently completed a study of cochlear gene therapy as a potential approach to treating children born with genetic forms of hearing loss. In follow-up studies, he and his colleagues demonstrated that virally mediated gene therapy can successfully restore the hearing phenotype in a mouse model of genetic deafness. While at UCSF, Dr. Lustig collaborated with researchers in orthopedic surgery to study cochlear bone development. Using animal models and molecular techniques applied to bone growth and development, they looked at how the material properties of bone enclosing the inner ear contribute to hearing