Zachary Adam Smith MD

Dr. Zachary A. Smith is a neurosurgeon who treats all surgical diseases of the brain and spine. However, he has a specific interest in both minimally invasive spinal techniques for adult degenerative spinal disease, spinal tumors, trauma, and spinal column deformity. Dr. Smith graduated as a Presidential Scholar from Dartmouth College and then completed both his medical school and neurosurgical training at UCLA at the Ronald Reagan-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA. He did further training in minimally invasive spine surgery at Good Samaritan Hospital (USC). He then completed an advanced deformity and minimally invasive fellowship at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and was recognized for this with both the CNS Spine Fellowship award and the AANS/CNS Spine Section Apfelbaum Award. Dr. Smith has published greater than 150 combined peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and editorials primarily on minimally invasive techniques in the spine. This includes two books that focused on minimally invasive spine techniques. He has published in multiple journals including Nature, Neurosurgery, Journal of Neurosurgery, Neurology, and the Journal of NeuroOncology. He is on the Editorial Board of both PlosOne (Public Library of Science) and Operative Neurosurgery. He has a developed interest in developing new minimally invasive techniques for advanced spinal disease. This includes both surgical treatments in the operating room as well as stereotactic radio-surgery and radiotherapy. Further, his research involves the study of spinal biomechanics,motion segments in the spine, and abnormal neck posture. Recently, he is excited to bring the use of wearable activity monitoring technology (FitBit) to his practice to study how patients respond to spine surgery.