Michael Lawton MD, FAANS

Michael T. Lawton, MD, is the President and CEO of Barrow Neurological Institute, Robert F. Spetzler Endowed Chair in Neurosciences, and Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery. He is board certified by the American Board of Neurological Surgery.

Dr. Lawton’s neurosurgical expertise includes cerebrovascular disorders (aneurysms, arteriovenous malformations, cavernous malformations, and stroke) and skull base tumors. He has experience in treating more than 5,200 brain aneurysms, 1,000 arteriovenous malformations, and 1,000 cavernous malformations, including more than 300 in the brain stem and other highly delicate areas of the brain. He is a member of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, Congress of Neurological Surgeons, Society of Neurological Surgeons, American Academy of Neurological Surgery, and World Academy of Neurological Surgery.

Dr. Lawton received a degree in biomedical engineering from Brown University and his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He completed his neurosurgery residency at Barrow, where he also completed a fellowship in cerebrovascular and skull base surgery. After joining the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco, he later completed a fellowship in endovascular surgery there.

Dr. Lawton’s research studies the formation, underlying genetics, and rupture of brain AVMs, as well as the hemodynamics, rupture, and computational modeling of brain aneurysms. His clinical research studies the anatomy of microsurgical approaches and clinical outcomes of microsurgery for aneurysms, AVMs, and bypass surgery. He is the principal investigator for the Brain Vascular Malformation Consortium, an NIH-funded multicenter group studying the genetics and clinical course of rare vascular diseases of the brain. He has published more than 770 peer-reviewed articles, six single-author textbooks, and more than 100 book chapters.

Knowing neurosurgical education must continue during the pandemic, Dr. Lawton launched Seven Series, a series collection of narrated case studies with histories, imaging studies, and illustrations from the Barrow Neuroscience Publications animation studio. He also initiated Barrow Neurosurgery Base Camp, a series of videos capturing resident teaching rounds to help neurosurgeons sharpen their skills. These efforts have helped to make him one of the most prominent and influential neurosurgeons on Twitter.