Board-certified neurosurgeon Joseph Watson, MD, welcomes patients at his private practice, Cerebrum MD, in Vienna, Virginia. While he sees patients at his convenient Tysons Corner office, he performs surgeries out of hospitals in Fairfax and Reston, Virginia, and at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
Dr. Watson specializes in pituitary tumors, meningiomas, brain tumors, and spinal surgery. He also treats the full range of brain conditions, including cerebrovascular disease, trigeminal neuralgia, hemifacial spasm, Chiari malformation, arteriovenous malformations, and spinal tumors.
Dr. Watson’s interest in the brain began when he was a biology major at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and was further nurtured when he studied the concept of brain protection and preventing brain cell death at the University of California, San Francisco.
After receiving his medical degree at the University of California, San Diego, he completed an internship and neurosurgical residency at the Medical College of Virginia, now the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) College of Medicine, in Richmond. He temporarily deferred entering medical practice to train with a world expert in pituitary surgery, Ed Oldfield, MD, at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
With a strong desire to understand disease processes, Dr. Watson has remained involved in research, publishing numerous original papers in scientific journals. At his practice, he gives patients the opportunity to participate in research on pituitary and brain tumors.
Dr. Watson partners with George Washington University (GWU) in Washington, DC, and George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where they study excess tumor cells removed during surgery, searching to answer fundamental questions about the origin of tumors and to discover potential new treatments.
Dr. Watson is the medical director of the Brain Tumor Center of MedStar Georgetown University Hospital and the medical director of neuroscience at Reston Hospital Center. He’s also a professor of neurosurgery at GWU and an associate professor at VCU.
Dr. Watson is the founder and director of the INOVA Neurosurgery Group at INOVA Health System in Falls Church, Virginia. He speaks French and medical Spanish.
