While long days are no anomaly in medicine, Elad Levy stands out as tireless even among physicians.

His CV is a dense 55 pages. An associate professor of neurosurgery and a clinical associate professor of radiology, he is first author on more than three dozen articles published in peer-reviewed journals and coauthor on upwards of 100. He has pioneered a method for performing minimally invasive spinal surgery. In 2007 he made headlines when he helped treat Buffalo Bills player Kevin Everett, who sustained a severe spinal cord injury.

L. Nelson Hopkins, chair of UB’s Department of Neurosurgery, calls Levy a “rising star.”

“I think he’s one of the most exciting young neurosurgeons that I’ve ever come across. We’ve got a lot of great, great guys in our department, and Elad is one of them. He has, at an incredibly young age, achieved an enormous amount.”

While many medical students struggle to choose a specialty, Levy knew by the end of his first year at medical school that his interest lay in neurosurgery.

“I thought it was very challenging, and I always like challenges,” Levy says. “I thought it was very diverse. From a technical standpoint, you get to do microscopic surgery, a very fine manual skill, but you also get to do macrosurgery—when you’re operating on the spine, for instance. And the fact that we know so little about the brain—I thought it was a field where there was an opportunity to make an impact.”

Today, Levy’s interests within neurosurgery vary. He works with aerospace engineers to better understand blood flow patterns, which share characteristics with airflows and can, when abnormal, lead to strokes. He and colleagues earned FDA approval for the first prospective trial to test the usage of stents in the human brain to prevent acute ischemic strokes.

A specialist in minimally invasive neurosurgery, Levy performed the first U.S. surgery using axial lumbar interbody fusion, a method of stabilizing the lumbar spine in patients experiencing back or leg pain.

“If I have any strengths, one of my strengths is foresight, and I knew that the field of neurosurgery would become increasingly minimally invasive,” Levy says. “We’re not going to be peeling down a person’s scalp and opening a hole in their skull when we can do (surgery) through a puncture.”

Currently, Levy is co-principal investigator on a landmark prospective randomized double-blinded study to test the safety and efficacy of interventional endovascular therapy—dubbed “liberation treatment”—on the symptoms and progression of multiple sclerosis.

Levy’s wide-ranging knowledge and expertise, along with his vigor, have earned him the admiration of the young doctors with whom he works on a daily basis. Kenneth Snyder, chief resident in UB’s neurosurgery department, calls Levy a “superb teacher.”

“He often accomplishes more in a day than most people do in a week,” Snyder says. “In terms of residents, we can’t keep up with him.”