William S. Anderson, MD, PhD

William S. Anderson is a professor of neurosurgery and holds the A. Earl Walker, M.D. Professorship in Functional Neurosurgery. He offers comprehensive treatments for Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor and dystonia, including deep brain stimulation (DBS) therapies and focused ultrasound for essential tremor.

As a member of the epilepsy surgery team, Dr. Anderson performs resection, laser ablation and diagnostic procedures — including robotic-assisted depth electrode placement — as well as therapeutic neuromodulation using DBS and responsive neurostimulation for epilepsy. He uses intraoperative MRI techniques for neuromodulation, laser ablation and newer gene therapy procedures for Huntington’s disease and epilepsy.

After receiving his medical degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Dr. Anderson completed a neurosurgical residency at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, followed by fellowship training in functional neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Anderson served as an attending neurosurgeon at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital (Harvard Medical School), and earned a doctorate in physics from Princeton University.

Dr. Anderson leads the Functional Neurosurgery Laboratory at Johns Hopkins, which focuses on the computational modeling of epilepsy as a method to understand the time and spatial evolutionary properties of seizures. Modeling methods include large scale multicompartment simulations for the extraction of electrophysiology signals. Using these modeling tools, the lab explores how fast seizures spread, the spatial extent of spread, the spread of interictal spikes, and the introduction of therapies such as drug diffusion and electrical stimulation. The laboratory has also been very active in neuromodulation system design in the context of Parkinson’s disease and memory function exploration. Dr. Anderson and the laboratory have multiple patents and publications related to the ePACStim system, which is designed to deliver phase-targeted stimulation pulses while guided by biomarker recordings.

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