Magnuson Professor and Chairman
Department of Neurology

Adjunct Professor
Physiology and Biophysics

Research Profile (COS)

Office Phone: 206-543-2340

Bruce Ransom is the founding chairman of the Department of Neurology. Dr. Ransom was born in New Mexico, and received much of his education in the Midwest, including completion of an MD and PhD in Neurophysiology in only five years while attending Washington University. After his internship, he became a postdoctoral research fellow at the NIH, and then completed a Neurology residency at Stanford where he stayed on their faculty until 1987. From there, he went to Yale University where he was director of the outpatient neurology clinic and advanced to Professor of Neurology with a secondary appointment in Cellular and Molecular Physiology. In 1995, he was recruited by the University of Washington School of Medicine to Seattle as Professor and Chairman of the newly formed Department of Neurology. He is an Adjunct Professor in Physiology and Biophysics and also holds the Warren and Jermaine Magnuson Chair in Medicine for Neurosciences.

Dr. Ransom is an internationally recognized authority on the physiology and function of glial cells and on the pathophysiology of neural injury. He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the journal GLIA, and serves on the editorial boards of several neuroscience journals. He has received a number of honors and awards for his professional activities, including the Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award. Especially relevant to stroke is the research that Dr. Ransom and colleagues conduct on how the long processes of neurons, called axons, are injured. Much of the neurological dysfunction seen after stroke is a consequence of axonal damage.