Surgeons I'd send my own family to.

Dual-fellowship-trained spine surgeon, Deputy Editor of The Spine Journal, and the state's decade-long referral destination for its hardest spine cases — top 5% surgical volume in Iowa, 110+ peer-reviewed publications.

A University of Iowa orthopaedic surgery graduate (Class of 2026) now in spine fellowship at Louisville's storied Leatherman Spine Center — the program that performed the world's first case on the Stealth AXiS robotic platform, the same system arriving at this practice. He joins the team on completing his fellowship. Sixteen-plus peer-reviewed publications — including machine-learning mortality prediction in spinal metastasis co-authored with Dr. Pugely — an editorship at the Iowa Orthopedic Journal, and national patient-education writing for the AAOS. Before medicine: an EMT and certified nursing assistant who worked his way from a farmhand's job to the operating room.

The surgeon who brought minimally invasive, outpatient spine surgery to the Quad Cities — head of the Back, Neck & Spine Center at Orthopaedic Specialists, Medical Director of the Mississippi Valley Surgery & Endoscopy Center, and the region's most experienced XLIF (lateral fusion) surgeon. His rapid-recovery protocols routinely have patients home within 24 hours.

A Mayo Clinic-trained neurosurgeon — residency 1983–1989 — with a statewide reputation in cervical spine surgery built over more than three decades at Cedar Neurological Surgeons in Cedar Rapids. Patients seek him out for a meticulous technique that often has them home within hours, and he believes in operating only when it's necessary — his words, on the record. Co-investigator in the FDA trial of the Prestige LP artificial cervical disc. His research years produced publications in Neurosurgery and the Journal of Neurosurgery on stereotactic microsurgery — including work co-authored with M. Gazi Yaşargil, the most celebrated neurosurgeon of the modern era.

Fellowship-trained at the University of Virginia in orthopaedic spine surgery, and board certified by the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery. His path to the operating room started with his hands: a decade maintaining dairy-farm machinery, building houses, and reconditioning mechanical testing equipment — then a physics degree, a full-tuition merit scholarship to Wayne State's medical school, and its Medical Student Scholar Award. That mechanic's understanding of load, wear, and alignment is exactly how he approaches the degenerative spine — stenosis, disc herniation, and nerve pain, with a special clinical interest in sciatica. In practice as an orthopaedic spine surgeon in southeast Iowa since 2022.

A quarter-century of spine surgery in the Quad Cities — thousands of operations across Trinity Rock Island, Moline, and Bettendorf, MercyOne Genesis Davenport and Silvis, and the Crow Valley surgical suite at the practice's own Bettendorf address. Fellowship-trained through the San Francisco Combined Spine Surgery Fellowship at Stanford Medical Center and St. Mary's. Twice elected to lead his peers — Chairman of Surgery at Trinity Medical Center (2023–2025) and Chairman of Orthopaedic Surgery before that. A device designer whose royalty-bearing work is in the Globus VIP cervical plate. His range runs from multi-level fusion to arthroscopy and joint replacement — and he now brings that judgment to the practice in a senior, part-time role — seeing patients in Waterloo: experience, on call.