In his own words, UC San Diego alumnus Michael Levy was a "bad kid." He and his brother used to routinely cause trouble, which often forced the family to move. During an eighth grade parent-teacher conference, Levy's teacher told his mom that he was no good and was going to end up a criminal. Fast forward several decades and now he's Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Rady Children's Hospital San Diego and a Clinical Professor Track X of Neurological Surgery at UC San Diego School of Medicine. It's a pretty far cry from a life of crime.
But how did he get to where he is today?
"My way here has been kind of a strange one," he concedes. "If it wasn't for UCSD, I don't think I would have ended up in medicine. And if I hadn't gone to UCSD, I'd probably still be waiting tables and surfing up in Big Sur."
Levy's path began in Monterey, CA, where he grew up. When his mother heard the teacher's prediction that Levy would become a criminal, she enrolled him at a local private school on a sports scholarship. Although he hated the school, it was there that Levy began to develop the mindset to go to college. As long as he maintained a C average and participated in sports, he was allowed to stay.
"Nobody in my family ever went to college," he says. "Some didn't even finish high school. And none of my friends were going to college. But everybody at that private school went to college. There was just this expectation that you would go so I figured I'd go, too."
UC San Diego was the only university Levy applied to. "We didn't have much money so the UC system was a good value," he says. "I had this perception of San Diego that just seemed to fit with what I wanted."
Levy began attending UC San Diego in the fall of 1977 as a psychology major. He flourished at the university, feeding his appetite for knowledge with a variety of classes.
"I remember one quarter I wanted to take eight classes; they were just all so interesting," he says. "I had to talk to the dean to get approval."
In his junior year, he started working for Daniel Kripke, a doctor and professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego who was doing research on hemispheric dominance in people - studying the way in which the two major sides of the brain function and what processes each side influences.
One day, not long after Levy graduated, Kripke sat him down and asked him what he intended to do.
"I told him that I had a job waiting for me at the River Inn in Big Sur. I was going to wait tables because I really liked doing that. It's what I had done every summer," recalls Levy. "He told me I needed to go into medicine and not to waste my time."
Once Kripke convinced him to go into medicine, Levy decided he would go into neurosurgery.
"It makes no sense, really," he says. "I mean I knew nothing about neurosurgery and never spent any time with physicians but that's what I did."
Fortunately, Levy had minored in chemistry, biology, history and literature while at UC San Diego and taken other courses that enabled him to apply for medical school. After taking a year off to go back to Monterey to work and surf, he applied to four medical schools and attended UC San Francisco School of Medicine on a partial scholarship.
After receiving his medical degree, he went to the University of Southern California to complete his internship and residency. While there, he was also able to complete his Ph.D. work. Levy then went to Children's Hospital Los Angeles to complete a two-year fellowship in pediatric neurosurgery, an area where he felt he could really use his training in intracranial surgery.
"The majority of adult neurosurgery is on the lumbar and cervical spine," he explains. "I like complex intracranial surgery so I tried to find the one specialty where I could spend most of my time operating on the brain."
Levy joined the USC faculty in 1993 where he stayed for nearly a decade. In 2002, he was offered the opportunity to start a division of pediatric neurosurgery at Children's Hospital San Diego, now Rady Children's Hospital San Diego. Initially, Levy had no interest in uprooting his family and leaving LA, but when the hospital agreed to the terms of his contract, there was no way he could refuse.
"It was the best move I ever made," he said.
Since then, Levy has worked hard to build one of the nation's top pediatric neurosurgery divisions. Under his leadership, Rady Children's has developed one of the most technologically significant operating rooms in the U.S. and is one of the few institutions able to treat pediatric patients with complex vascular diseases.
"One of the problems with pediatric neurosurgery is that kids are often sent to neurosurgeons who have only operated on adults," explains Levy. "I believe that if you're not a pediatric neurosurgeon, you shouldn't be operating on kids. From a neurovascular standpoint, there's not a pediatric service in the states that can compare to us."
In addition to his primary work on brain tumors and vascular malformations in children, Levy focuses on complex surgical approaches for children and trains residents. He is also involved in a number of studies related to the adult field - concussive injury in sports, blast injuries in veterans and using stem cells to help return some function to adults with stroke. He also does outreach work and has helped build hospitals, train doctors and perform surgeries in other countries including Uganda, Peru and Ukraine.
In the future, Levy envisions continuing to build the program at Rady Children's and strengthening the team approach to treating brain tumors and vascular lesions.
"The best way to treat these cases is with a team of specialists," says Levy. "When you bring everyone together - neurooncologists, neuroradiologists, neuroopthalmologists - you get so many levels of expertise. There are so many people contributing and helping to find solutions. It makes a huge difference for what we can do for these kids and their families."
