About the Chair

Dr. Günel is the Nixdorff-German Professor of Neurosurgery and professor of genetics and neurobiology. He is the director of the Yale Program in Brain Tumor Research, co-director of the Yale Program on Neurogenetics, and chief of the Section of Neurovascular Surgery. Dr. Günel obtained his medical degree at Istanbul University and completed his internship and residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital. His clinical expertise is in treating complex brain aneurysms and vascular malformations, as well as brain tumors.

His landmark genomic research has revealed the genetic risks for brain aneurysms, mutational landscape of brain tumors, and a multitude of genes fundamental in cortical development. Dr. Günel led the largest international genome wide association study of intracranial aneurysms, identifying several susceptibility loci, as published in two Nature Genetics papers. His lab, through multiple international collaborations, identified several genes mutated in malformations of cerebral cortical development. This work resulted in publications in Nature and Cell, in which Dr. Günel was a member of the international team that identified a previously unknown neurodegenerative disorder caused by a mutation in the CLP1 gene. In 2013, Dr. Günel was the senior author of a pivotal manuscript published in Science, which unveiled that somatic mutations in just five genes, including two that have never been implicated in neoplasia, can explain the mutational landscape of majority of meningiomas, the most common type of brain tumor.

Among other organizations, Dr. Günel is a member of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS). He previously served as chair of the AANS/CNS Cerebrovascular Section in 2011, and has been elected to the Society of Neurological Surgeons, Academy of Neurological Surgeons, and the National Academy of Medicine.