Graeme F. Woodworth, MD, FAANS, FAC
Howard M. Eisenberg, MD Distinguished Professor of Neurosurgery and Chair
Department of Neurosurgery
School of Medicine
Dr. Grame Woodworth joined the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) faculty in 2012 and has built an exemplary career as a clinician-scientist through his transformative application of novel technologies, expansive scholarship, scientific leadership, and groundbreaking research.
In addition to leading UMSOM’s Department of Neurosurgery, he is director of the Brain Tumor Treatment and Research Center at the University of Maryland Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center and founder and co-director of the University of Maryland Medical System’s Neuroscience Network.
The goal of Woodworth’s research is to improve the outcomes of patients with brain tumors by developing innovative therapies and therapeutic delivery approaches in neuro-oncology that ultimately will be applied to human malignancies in other organs.
He designed and led the first U.S. clinical trials to test the safety and feasibility of using focused ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier to treat brain tumors. This work set the foundation for Lotus Neuro, a new company that is advancing focused ultrasound plus drug combination therapies for brain diseases such as glioblastoma and Alzheimer’s disease.
In 2025, Woodworth co-led a team of four faculty members that competed in the National Institutes of Health’s Targeted Genome Editor Delivery Challenge, emerging as one of four teams in the country to advance to Phase 3. The UMSOM team combined focused ultrasound and nanoparticle delivery with precision gene editing tools across the blood-brain barrier, with the goal to eventually treat devastating neurological conditions such as Huntington’s disease and epilepsy.
Woodworth has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications in leading journals such as Science Translational Medicine, Lancet Oncology, PNAS, JAMA Oncology, and Science Advances, and his work has been cited more than 10,000 times. He is the co-inventor on five awarded patents, including those covering Decreased-Adhesivity Receptor-Targeted (DART) therapeutics, which recently were licensed to Lumigen Biotech, a Maryland company that will develop the DART technology for metastatic brain and other cancers.
Among his many accolades, Woodworth won the American Cancer Society’s 2016 Research Scholar Award and the Focused Ultrasound Foundation’s 2018 Lockhart Memorial Prize and 2022 Ferenc Jolesz Memorial Award, the latter two recognizing researchers who are advancing the field of focused ultrasound.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Tufts University and his medical degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
