The Robert A. Groff, MD Teaching and Research Chair of Neurosurgery II

This Professorship was established in 2021, when the value of the endowment of the Robert A. Groff Professorship of Teaching and Research in Neurosurgery had increased sufficiently to support a second professorship. The original Chair was established in 1997 by the bequest of Mary E. Groff to honor her brother, the prominent neurosurgeon Robert A. Groff, MD (1903–1975). A Penn and Perelman School of Medicine alumnus, Dr. Groff chaired the Departments of Neurosurgery at Graduate Hospital and at the Perelman School of Medicine. He was the inaugural holder of the Charles Harrison Frazier Professor of Neurosurgery chair. 

Dr. Groff graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1925 and from the Perelman School of Medicine in 1928. He pursued a variety of fellowships at Penn, in Boston, and in Europe. During World War II he served with the 20th General Hospital, the major military hospital organized and run by Penn Medicine to provide medical care for the American, British, and Chinese forces in northeastern India. The hospital won acclaim for achieving an overall mortality rate of only 0.4 percent for its 73,000 patients, despite primitive conditions and the constant threat of malaria and other infectious diseases. 

Following the war, Dr. Groff joined the faculty at Graduate Hospital, becoming Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery in 1955 and Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery in the Perelman School in 1957. He had trained under the legendary Dr. Charles Harrison Frazier (1870–1936) and in 1963 was appointed the first holder of the Frazier chair. Dr. Groff was granted emeritus status in 1973. 

Current Chairholder

Bijan Pesaran, PhD

Bijan Pesaran, PhD, is the Robert A. Groff Professor of Research and Teaching in Neurosurgery II and Professor of Neuroscience and Bioengineering at the Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Pesaran completed his undergraduate degree in Physics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, England. After a year in the Theoretical Physics Department at Bell Labs Murray Hill, he went on to earn his PhD in Physics at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Pesaran then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience, also at Caltech. Before coming to Penn in 2022, Dr. Pesaran rose through the ranks to become Professor of Neural Science at the Center for Neural Science at New York University. 

Dr. Pesaran’s research investigates how perception, action, and cognition result from the activity of populations of neurons by developing devices and algorithms to monitor and manipulate neurons in different regions of the brain. His research spans preclinical studies in the non-human primate animal model and first-in-human clinical trials. The work is engineering new generations of brain-machine interfaces that map and manipulate brain networks during cognition and behavior to help patients suffering neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders.  

Trainees of Dr. Pesaran occupy tenured and tenure-track faculty appointments nationally and internationally, as well as positions in the FDA and wider neurotechnology industry. Among other honors and awards, Dr. Pesaran has received a Burroughs-Wellcome Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a McKnight Scholar Award, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and is a member of the Simons Collaboration for the Global Brain. In 2013, he was a CV Starr Visiting Scholar at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University. Dr. Pesaran’s research is funded by the NIH, the NSF, other federal agencies, and private foundations.