The Charles Harrison Frazier Professorship of Neurosurgery

Established in 1936 through the efforts of the family of Charles H. Frazier, MD (1870–1936), the Professorship honors the internationally celebrated pioneer in brain surgery, committed social activist, and esteemed alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania Class of 1889 and Perelman School of Medicine Class of 1892.

Dr. Frazier became a member of the medical faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1898. He developed highly successful, efficient surgical techniques for the removal of brain tumors and devised surgical procedures that were used to control the pain of trigeminal neuralgia and other conditions. Dr. Frazier established one of the early schools for teaching neurological surgery and, in 1920, was one of the founders of the Society of Neurological Surgeons, serving as the second president after Dr. Harvey Cushing. In addition to organizing the first Social Service Department at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Frazier was Dean of the Perelman School of Medicine from 1901 to 1910 and was the sixth John Rhea Barton Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery from 1922 to 1936.

Current Chairholder
Daniel Yoshor, MD

Daniel Yoshor is the current holder of the Charles Harrison Frazier Professorship, which is given to the current chair of the Department of Neurosurgery. Prior to coming to Penn, he served as the Marc J. Shapiro Professor and Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine. He holds a BA in philosophy from Yeshiva University and an MD degree with honors from the University of Chicago. He completed his neurosurgery residency at Baylor College of Medicine followed by fellowship training in brain tumor and epilepsy surgery at the University of California, San Francisco.  

As a clinical neurosurgeon, Dr. Yoshor focuses on tumor and epilepsy surgery. He has one of the largest experiences in the nation in endoscopic pituitary and skull base tumor surgery. He also has extensive experience in the development and clinical implementation of novel neurotechnologies. As a neuroscientist, Dr. Yoshor is an established principal investigator with a long record of NIH, DARPA, and VA Merit Award funding. Work from his laboratory has been published in leading scientific journals including Cell, Current Biology, eLife, Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, Journal of Neuroscience, Neuron, and PNAS. His long-term research goals are to understand how neural activity in the brain is linked to perception and to develop a cortical visual prosthetic device to restore vision to the blind, in collaboration with a larger team of scientists, engineers, and clinicians. 

Previous Chairholders

• Francis C. Grant, MD 1937–1957
• Robert Groff, MD 1957–1968
• Thomas W. Langfitt, MD 1968–1987
• Eugene S. Flamm, MD 1988–1998
• Sean Grady 1999–2020