Neurosurgeon earns Wright State’s Distinguished Alumni Award

Solving high-stakes problems is second nature to Nicholas Bambakidis, M.D. After all, he performs brain surgery for a living. The Wright State University physics graduate turned leading neurosurgeon is the 2025 recipient of the university’s Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award.

“The Wright State degree embodies getting my career off the ground,” he said. “The degree itself is a piece of paper, but it embodies all of the tools I needed to do extremely well in medicine, and in one of the hardest subspecialities, neurosurgery.”

Bambakidis serves as vice president and director of the Neurological Institute and chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery at University Hospitals in Cleveland. He is also the Harvey Huntington Brown Jr. chair in neurological surgery at Case Western Reserve University, where he is a professor of neurological surgery.

An internationally recognized expert in cerebrovascular and skull base surgery, Bambakidis specializes in the treatment of disorders affecting the blood vessels that supply the brain. His research focuses on the central nervous system’s capacity to recover after injury and has led to numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals.

He has edited four neurosurgical textbooks, serves as a reviewer for six leading medical journals and is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences, where he presents on topics including complex surgical cases, brain tumor management and advanced skull base techniques.

In 2022, Bambakidis served as president of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. He is a member of several prestigious professional organizations, including the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the Society of Neurointerventional Surgery and the Society of Neurological Surgeons.

Neurosurgeon Nicholas Bambakidis received the 2025 Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from the Wright State University Alumni Association.

Although he earned his medical degree from Case Western Reserve University, Bambakidis credits his education at Wright State with preparing him for a career in neurosurgery.

“Coming from a physics background, what you do all the time is solve problems that face you,” he said. “The stakes are really high in what I do. If you’re wrong, patients can literally die. You have to be able to take all the facts and assimilate them relatively quickly. The training you get from the earliest time in your career really lays that foundation.

“To say I got my start at Wright State,” he added, “is meaningful and impactful to me.