About Dr. Cantu

Dr. Cantu is Chief of Neurosurgery Service and Director of Sports Medicine at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts, co-director of the Neurologic Sports Injury Center at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Medical Director of the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, an ongoing registry founded in 1982 to collect and analyze data on spine and head injuries. He is one of the leading experts on concussions in sports and the author of the most widely used concussion grading and return-to-play guidelines.

Dr. Cantu serves, or has served, on numerous boards of professional organizations and as a consultant to scholastic and professional athletes on the return to sports after a head or spine injury. From 1992 to 1993, he was President of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), the oldest and largest sports medicine and exercise science organization in the world, serving as Treasurer from 1996 to 1999. As spokesperson for the ACSM, he has been interviewed on numerous national television shows, including the "NFL Today" (the effect of artificial turf on cervical spine injuries), CNBC's "The Real Story" (football injuries), "World News Tonight" (the deaths of NASCAR's Dale Earnhardt and the NFL's Korey Stringer from heat stroke and radio programs (including National Public Radio's "All Things Considered").

The author of over 250 scientific publications, including 17 books on neurology and sports medicine, numerous book chapters, peer-reviewed papers, abstracts and educational videos, Dr. Cantu is a frequent lecturer on a variety of health-related topics, including sports safety issues for high school athletic trainers, coaches, students and parents.

Dr. Cantu received his B.A. from the University of California, where he pitched on the varsity baseball team, and his M.A. in endocrinology and M.D. from the University of California Medical School in San Francisco. He did his surgical internship at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, his neurosurgery residency at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), was a research fellow in physiology at Harvard Medical School, and, prior to joining Emerson Hospital, spent five years on the neurosurgery staff at MGH, as acting assistant director of neurosurgery and director of pediatric neurosurgery at Boston City Hospital, and in academic neurosurgery at the Harvard teaching hospitals.