Dr. Aronson is the Primary Investigator of the laboratory and serves as an attending neurosurgeon and Director of Epilepsy Surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He has an appointment as Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a. bachelor of science degree, followed by medical school at Harvard Medical School-MIT in the Health Sciences and Technology (HST) Program. He then went on to complete residency and dedicated fellowship in functional neurosurgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital.
In 2016, he transitioned to independent practice at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) and the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College. There, he directed the functional neurosurgery and epilepsy surgery programs while developing a laboratory jointly between DHMC and the White River Junction VA Medical Center investigating network effects of deep brain stimulation in rodent traumatic brain injury models. Using a shockwave apparatus that produces diffuse brain injuries in rodents he demonstrated enhancement of spatial learning through stimulation of the nucleus accumbens after cortical impact and blast injuries. Clinically, he transformed the functional and epilepsy programs, instituting the asleep MRI-guided DBS surgery program, robotic DBS program, minimally invasive stereoEEG epilepsy program, and minimally invasive laser ablation program for epilepsy and brain tumors.
In 2022, Dr. Aronson was recruited back to Boston in his current role at BIDMC. His clinical areas of focus include deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s Disease, essential tremor, dystonia, and OCD, including awake and asleep MRI-guided approaches. He focuses on epilepsy surgery, including minimally invasive robotic stereoEEG, resection, laser ablation, and neuromodulation. He also specializes in the treatment of facial pain and hemifacial spasm, performing microvascular decompression, radiofrequency rhizotomy, and stereotactic radiosurgery. Administrative roles include serving as the Surgical Director of the BIDMC NAEC Level 4 epilepsy center.
Dr. Aronson's research includes NIH-funded and industry-funded projects around novel devices and applications for neuromodulation. He served as co-investigator of the multidisciplinary clinical and translational research team for the DARPA RAM (Restoring Active Memory) project led Michael Kahana at the University of Pennsylvania and as site PI for the subsequent NIH-funded study on using direct brain stimulation to study cognitive electrophysiology (1U01NS113198). He served as co-investigator in a multi-institutional collaboration, funded by a NINDS UG3/UH3 grant (UG3NS112826), developing a groundbreaking closed-loop neuromodulation approach to restore arousal during seizures. He implanted the very first human subject with a quadruple lead device with leads in the bilateral CL nucleus and bilateral hippocampi for medically refractory epilepsy. In recognition of his commitment to the development of novel approaches to treating neurological disease Dr. Aronson has been appointed as a charter member of the Bioengineering and Tissue Engineering for Neuroscience (BTEN) NIH study section.