Cedars-Sinai Medical Center resident neurosurgeon Dr. Lindsey Ross has been selected as a 2016-2017 White House Fellow.

Dr. Lindsey Ross

Ross will spend the next year in Washington, D.C. working with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and participating in roundtable discussions with top government leaders, including the president and vice president.

“I feel so grateful for this opportunity. I know I will learn a great deal about healthcare, leadership and policymaking next year, which I hope to bring back to Cedars-Sinai and the greater Los Angeles community that we serve,” Ross said.

The White House Fellows Program was founded in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson to offer firsthand experience working at the highest levels of the federal government. Graduates include former Secretary of State Colin Powell, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and CNN medical correspondent and neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta.

“Ross is one of the best students I have ever had,” said Dr. Julia Y. Ljubimova, director of the Nanomedicine Research Center in the Cedars-Sinai Department of Neurosurgery. “I have no doubt that she will make an exceptional addition to the group of intellectual elite individuals selected to the White House Fellows Program and help to improve the fabric of the healthcare industry in the U.S.”

Ross was a Denzel and Pauletta Washington Family Gifted Scholar at Cedars-Sinai in 2008 when she was a first-year medical school student at UCLA. She worked with Ljubimova in the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute laboratories and helped with research on an innovative system using tiny drugs delivered through the blood-brain barrier to target hard-to-reach cancers.

Ross started her neurosurgical residency at Cedars-Sinai in 2012. Her education in neurosurgery includes trauma surgery, neurocritical care and neurology. Ross also serves on the Cedars-Sinai medical education and house staff committees, working on quality improvement projects related to patient care.

“Many of the skills you build as a physician are also essential to be an effective leader,” Ross said. “You learn to listen to your patients, synthesize subjective and objective information and as a surgeon, have an unrelenting focus on the task at hand because someone’s life depends on it.”