Maxwell Boakye

Ole A., Mabel Wise and Wilma Wise Nelson Chair in Clinical Geriatrics Research

School of Medicine

Maxwell Boakye, M.D. is director of spinal neurosurgery at the University of Louisville and director of the Neurosurgical Outcomes and Translational Research (NOTR) and spinal cord injury research labs.  He is also an associate professor of neurosurgery at the Center for Advanced Neurosurgery (CAN).  

Boakye served as director of the neural plasticity lab and outcomes research laboratory at Stanford University and Palo Alto VA from 2003 – 2010.  His extensive research interest involves the study of changes in sensorimotor cortical and spinal physiology after injury to the central and peripheral nervous system. Dr. Boakye’s major focus is on spinal cord injury with the goal of understanding the relationship between sensorimotor plasticity and recovery after spinal cord injury.  

Boakye completed undergraduate degrees in mathematics and physics at Rutgers University in 1989. He obtained his medical degree at Weill Cornell Medical College in 1995 and neurosurgical residency training at SUNY-Upstate in 2002. He then completed training in spinal neurosurgery at Emory University and Memorial Sloan-Kettering  Cancer Center prior to joining Stanford University, where he was assistant professor of neurosurgery  from 2003-2010.