Growing up in rural New York near the Canadian border, Elad Levy had no idea he would one day become one of neurosurgery’s boldest innovators.

Levy, SUNY Distinguished Professor and L. Nelson Hopkins Chair of Neurosurgery in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, says the county where he grew up had one of the lowest college matriculation rates in the state. For his last two years of high school, his parents sent him to Choate Rosemary Hall, a private school known for its academic rigor.

“I came from a rural upstate New York education system into a hyper-competitive New England boarding school,” Levy says in the latest episode of UB’s Driven to Discover podcast. “So, certainly my grades were not at the top of the class. I had a lot of catching up to do.”

At Choate, he also discovered he had a passion — and a talent — for rowing. “It was the years of what I call ‘bloody hands,’” he recalls. “I knew my ticket out of upstate New York or northern New York, or potentially my ticket into the next level of education, was bloody hands. So, every day I would row till my hands bled, and I think that paid off.”

It did. He was recruited to Dartmouth, where he continued to row and became a member of USRowing’s Under 19 National Team. After college, he figured he’d be a professional rower but his father suggested a medical degree as a backup. For a while, he tried to do both, but soon realized that studying until 1 a.m., waking up at 5 a.m. to row and then trying not to nod off in class at 8 a.m. wasn’t going to work. He put rowing on the back burner and leaned into medical school.

By the end of his first year, he landed a summer scholarship in neurosurgery, which changed everything.

“It’s sort of that last frontier of unknown of the human body, right?” says Levy. “We really are only now exploring the intricacies of the brain. We’re only now truly understanding that these regions that we thought were silent are not silent. We’re just developing technologies now that we can instrument the brain in minimally invasive ways. So, for me, that was very exciting.”

That fascination has motivated Levy to continue to push the boundaries throughout his career. He was instrumental in establishing thrombectomy, the surgical removal of a blood clot, as the standard of care for stroke, and among the first surgeons to implant a brain-computer interface stent for people living with paralysis.

“Think about reconnecting a human with the world,” Levy says. “So you’re trapped in your body. You can’t move. You probably can’t speak well. You need people to ask you, ‘Do you want a glass of water?’ ‘Do you need to go to the bathroom?’ ‘Do you want me to take your wheelchair outside?’ You’re basically locked in. But now imagine we can outsource that to a peripheral. You can initiate conversation. ‘Please take me outside.’ ‘Please open my window.’ … Imagine the freedom, or the humanity, you give back to someone who has ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

Levy also does carotid artery stenting in an ambulatory surgery center, a major milestone for the field, which, he explains, is all part of the move for more routine procedures to be done on an outpatient basis.

“So that is sort of my next passion now,” he says. “Can we decrease the cost curve, increase satisfaction for patients, increase satisfaction for the physicians, and reduce the bottleneck and wait time in a hospital? So you’re not waiting three months to get your carotid artery stented or your brain aneurysm endovascularly treated.”