From modest origins in a tiny Ohio town, Jeffrey D. Gross, MD, is a determined neurosurgeon who has achieved amazing success through hard work and enthusiasm. As one of four high school students chosen for a research position at the NIH, he immediately became well-known. He studied under Nobel Prize-winning academics at Berkeley after declining offers from MIT and Johns Hopkins. Later, he received training at prestigious trauma hospitals, where he advanced methods in neurosurgery and spinal biomechanics and wrote significantly for medical publications.