Praveen V. Mummaneni was born in Europe and grew up in Chicago and Los Angeles. He earned his undergraduate and medical degrees from an accelerated 6-year program at Boston University and was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha honor society as a junior medical student. He subsequently completed his neurosurgical residency at the University of California, San Francisco. During his residency, he spent his research year at the Orthopaedic Biomechanics Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Mummaneni then completed spine fellowship training at Emory University.
During his spine fellowship, he received advanced subspecialty training in adult spinal deformity surgery at Northwestern University and at Washington University in St. Louis. He was the first neurosurgeon to be awarded the Edgar Dawson Scholarship from the Scoliosis Research Society and this allowed him to visit the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. He was also the first neurosurgeon to be awarded the Scoliosis Research Society's European Traveling Fellowship Award, traveling to the University of Edinburgh, to Langensteinbach in Germany, and to the Institute Calot in France.
Dr. Mummaneni served as an assistant professor of neurosurgery and orthopedics at Emory University from 2002-2006. In 2006, he returned to UCSF as an associate professor, Co-director of the UCSF Spine Center, and Director of the Minimally Invasive and Complex Spine Fellowship. He was subsequently promoted to be the Joan O'Reilly Endowed Professor and Vice Chair of Neurosurgery at UCSF. Dr. Mummaneni has been selected annually from 2005 as one of the Best Doctors in America.
He has been the Honored Guest of neurosurgical meetings on six continents. He has edited seven textbooks and has published over 300 peer reviewed papers. He completed his term as editor in chief of Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine in 2017. Dr. Mummaneni has served as the Chair of the AANS/CNS Joint Section on Disorders of the Spine and Peripheral Nerves and as President of the California Association of Neurological Surgeons. He now serves as treasurer of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons and has been a member of the Executive Committee since 2011.