Dr. Thomas Chen is a physician, a board-certified neurosurgeon, and the Director of Surgical Neuro-oncology at USC. He is highly recognized for his skills as a neurosurgeon and is also a tenured Professor of Neurosurgery and Pathology at USC. Dr. Chen graduated summa cum laude in three years from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also received Bronze Tablet honors (top 3% of undergraduate students) and was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa national academic honor society. He then attended the University of California, San Francisco, where he was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha national medical honor society. Afterward, he underwent neurosurgery training at the University of Southern California (“USC”). In order to prepare for his career in neuro-oncology, Dr. Chen also obtained a Ph.D. degree in pathobiology. His thesis was on the role of immunotherapy in malignant brain tumors. He is also a fellowship-trained spine surgeon and one of a few surgical neuro-oncologists in the country who specialize in spine cancer surgery. Currently, Dr. Chen maintains a busy clinical practice in both surgical neuro-oncology and spine surgery. He heads a research laboratory focused on glioma biology. Dr. Chen has published extensively on glioma biology and neurosurgery. He is on the editorial board for The Spine Journal and Journal of Neuro-oncology and is on the review board for Neurosurgery and Journal of Neurosurgery. He is on numerous national neurosurgery committees.