Lola B. Chambless is Associate Professor of Neurological Surgery and the Neurosurgery Residency Program Director at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Born in Birmingham, AL, she grew up between Boston, MA, and Nashville, TN, before earning her B.S. at Stanford University. She graduated with her MD with Alpha Omega Alpha honors from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 2005, and completed residency in Neurological Surgery and fellowship in Neurosurgical Oncology at Vanderbilt as well. After a fellowship in Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery at Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, Australia, she joined the faculty at Vanderbilt in 2013.
Dr. Chambless has a busy clinical practice in brain tumor and skull base surgery and is the surgical director of the Vanderbilt Pituitary and Radiosurgery centers. She is an expert in endonasal and keyhole approaches to cranial pathology. Her diverse research interests include risk stratification of tumor cells in glioblastoma, computer-based modeling of intraoperative brain shift, and the use of machine learning techniques to predict outcomes in brain tumor surgery. Much of her energy is devoted to advancing neurosurgical education both locally, as Neurosurgery Program Director, and nationally, through organized neurosurgery and her own educational research.
In 2017, Dr. Chambless joined the Executive Committee of the CNS as the inaugural Chair of the CNS Data Science Committee. Since then, she has also served as Chair of the CNS Leadership Institute and Resident Committee, and Vice-Chair of the Education Division. She believes in scientific collaborations that cross traditional subspecialty boundaries, and she is focused on improving access to mentorship for future neurosurgeons by removing barriers to promote equity and inclusion within the field. She is also the proud mother of two daughters, Harper (11) and Sims (9) and partner to Dr. Scott Simon, MD, of Penn State Neurosurgery.