Associate Faculty Member
Division:
Spine
Site:
Vancouver – Vancouver General Hospital
Dr. Newton Cho is a surgeon-scientist with the International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD) at Vancouver General Hospital.
He completed his neurosurgical residency training at the University of Toronto in 2023. During his residency training, he also completed a PhD with Grégoire Courtine at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) examining neuromodulation to improve walking after spinal cord injury in 2021. His graduate work identified a novel target of deep brain stimulation that improves gait after chronic traumatic spinal cord injury.
He then went on to complete a stereotactic/functional neurosurgery fellowship at the University of Toronto in 2024. This was followed by a combined neurosurgery/orthopaedic spine surgery fellowship at the University of Calgary in 2025.
Dr. Cho has received a number of recognitions for his clinical and research work including the Warren Ho Memorial Scholarship by the University of Toronto, Biaggi de Blasys Foundation Award for best doctoral thesis, and the Science & PINS Prize for Neuromodulation.
His clinical interests include adult spine trauma, degenerative disease, tumours, and infections. His research program is very interested in the intersection of functional neurosurgery and spine surgery to improve gait after injury and neurodegenerative disease. He runs a basic science laboratory understanding brain and spinal cord circuits for gait with the aim to develop novel neuromodulatory therapies to improve walking after injury and disease.
Research Interests & Publications
Research Interests:
- Traumatic spinal cord injury
- Degenerative cervical myelopathy
- Neuromodulation for gait dysfunction
Publications:
- Cho N. Targeting the brain after spinal cord injury: Targeted deep brain stimulation improves walking after injury. Science 2025. doi: 10.1126/science.aea0845.
- Cho N, Al-Shawwa A, Jacobs WB, Evaniew N, Bouchard J, Casha S, et al. Spinal cord tract integrity in degenerative cervical myelopathy. Neurosurgery 2025. doi: 10.1227/neu.0000000000003428.
- Attarpour A, Osmann J, Rinaldi A, Qi T, Lal N, Patel S, Rozak M, Yu F, Cho N, et al. A deep learning pipeline for three-dimensional brain-wide mapping of local neuronal ensembles in teravoxel light-sheet microscopy. Nat Methods 2025. doi: 10.1038/s41592-024-02583-1.
- Cho N*, Squair JW*, Aureli V, James ND, Bole-Feysot L, Dewany I, et al. Hypothalamic deep brain stimulation augments walking after spinal cord injury. Nature Medicine 2024. doi: 10.1038/s41591-024-03306-x.
- Cho N, Squair J, Bloch J, Courtine G. Neurorestorative interventions involving bioelectronic implants after spinal cord injury. Bioelectronic Med 2019. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42234-019-0027-x
For more information regarding Dr. Cho published research, please click here.
Teaching Interests
- Spinal cord injury (traumatic and atraumatic)
- Spine trauma
- Neuromodulation for gait dysfunction
- Locomotor circuits
Academic Background
- Combined Neurosurgery/Orthopaedic Surgery Spine Fellowship, University of Calgary, 2025
- Stereotactic/Functional Neurosurgery Fellowship, University of Toronto, 2024
- FRCSC, Neurosurgery, University of Toronto, 2023
- PhD, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 2021
- MD, University of Toronto, 2013