• History

Last summer my wife Nicole and I packed up our three children, waved goodbye to the lovely city of Boston and spent a month on the road crossing North America to arrive in Seattle, Washington. We had both taken new roles at the University of Washington, she as Director of Neurorehabilitation and me as the Chair of the Neurology department. To say our lives are different would be an obvious understatement. In contemplating such a move, and since my arrival here, I have reflected deeply on leadership and the role it plays in our world.

Change in all our lives is constant. Fundamentally, I see leadership as how we, as a society and individuals within it, navigate and direct that change. Leadership in the face of change can happen from a tiny scale (eg, a family unit), to an immense one (eg, the level of nations). At some level, therefore, and in some role, we are all leaders.

Neuroscience, including our endovascular space, is subject to particularly dynamic change. This is a bold time. We saw for stroke how having a powerful therapeutic option (thrombectomy for patients suffering from emergent large vessel occlusion (ELVO) stroke) changed literally everything. That energy and change will be coming to many more areas in the Neurosciences given the therapeutic threshold we stand on. We are increasingly moving into disease modifying …