Praveen V. Mummaneni, MD

Dr. Praveen Mummaneni is co-director of the UCSF Spine Center, vice chair of the neurosurgery department, lead surgeon of the UCSF Parnassus Perioperative Services and director of the minimally invasive surgery spine fellowship. He has been selected by U.S. News & World Report as one of the best doctors in the nation every year since 2005. He has also received top doctor accolades from the San Francisco Chronicle, Marin Magazine and Castle Connolly.

Mummaneni earned his medical degree through the six-year BA-MD program at Boston University and completed a residency in neurological surgery at UCSF followed by a fellowship in complex spine surgery at Emory University. He also earned a master of business administration at Louisiana State University and completed a program in innovative healthcare leadership at Stanford University.

Mummaneni is the UCSF Joan O'Reilly Distinguished Professor in Spinal Surgery. He leads a neuroinformatics lab at UCSF and has mentored a diverse group of medical students, residents and fellows over the past two decades. He is internationally recognized for his work on minimally invasive approaches to treating spinal deformities, spinal tumors and degenerative disease. He is the UCSF lead for the Quality Outcomes Database Spine Care Project sponsored by the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the Minimally Invasive Surgery International Spine Study Group for spinal deformities, and the AO Spine Metastatic and Primary Tumor Research and Outcomes Network spine tumor study groups. He is also the UCSF lead for a Department of Defense grant to evaluate timing of surgery for spinal cord injury, a co-investigator of a UCSF HEAL Initiative grant from the National Institutes of Health to study back pain, and a member of the small business review panel at the National Institutes of Health. He has guest lectured at international meetings on six continents and has published more than 530 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals. He is an editor of nine textbooks on spinal surgery and serves on multiple editorial boards, including as associate editor of Neurosurgery and a previous term editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine.

Mummaneni is active in several professional organizations. He was among the first neurosurgeons to obtain active membership in the Scoliosis Research Society (SRS) and to win its Edgar Dawson Fellowship and International Traveling Fellowship. He has served as a director of SRS and is now secretary-elect. He was also president of the San Francisco Neurological Society, president of the California Association of Neurological Surgeon, chair of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons/Congress of Neurological Surgeons Spine Section, and vice president of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. He is currently a director of the American Board of Neurological Surgery.