Our History
University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University played a large part in the establishment of the field of Neurocritical Care. At Johns Hopkins in 1975, America’s first neurointensivist, Dr. David Jackson, had trained both in internal medicine and neurology when he was recruited to University Hospitals to become the first director of the newly opened medical intensive care unit, still under construction when he arrived. His research would focus on neurological complications of medical illness, post-cardiac arrest encephalopathy, and the challenging ethical dilemmas that were arising with the new critical care landscape, particularly in patients with severe brain injury (Jackson, D.L. and S. Youngner, Patient Autonomy and Death with Dignity. New England Journal of Medicine, 1979. 301(8): p. 404-408).
In 1978, the American Academy of Neurology asked David Jackson to organize the first course on “Critical Care Neurology.” In 1983, after being selected to become Ohio’s Director of Public Health, he turned this course over to Dr. Alan Ropper from Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dr. Jose Suarez, NSU Director from 1996 to 2006, is the author of Critical Care Neurology and Neurosurgery, one of the standard textbooks in the field. Dr. Suarez founded the Neurocritical Care fellowship in 1998.
Dr. Michael De Georgia has been the NSU Director since 2007. A leader in the emerging of fields of multi-modal monitoring and critical care informatics, he is the author of Neurocritical Care Informatics: Translating Raw Data into Bedside Action and is Associate Faculty Director of Connected Health at Case Western Reserve University. Under his leadership, the fellowship became accredited through the United Council of Neurologic Subspecialties (UCNS) in 2008 and the American Committee on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) in 2022. In 2022, University Hospitals / Case Western Reserve University was one of only seven institutions in the country to receive ACGME accreditation, the only institution in the Midwest, and the only institution in the state of Ohio.