John R. Adler

John R. Adler is an American neurosurgeon. He holds the Dorothy and Thye King Chan Endowed Professorship of Neurosurgery and is Vice Chair for Innovation and Technology in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University School of Medicine. In April 2010, Adler was appointed vice president and chief of New Clinical Applications at Varian Medical Systems.

Adler specializes in the treatment of brain and spinal tumors and trigeminal neuralgia. His primary area of academic interest is the development of non-invasive computer-controlled tools for neurosurgery. He is the inventor of the CyberKnife Radiosurgical System. Adler holds 9 United States patents and has authored over 180 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.

In 1991, Adler founded Accuray, the manufacturer of the CyberKnife, an image-guided radiosurgical robotic instrument that noninvasively ablates tumors and lesions throughout the body. He was chief executive officer from 1999 to 2002 and chief medical officer from 1991 until 2007. He also was a member of the Accuray board of directors from 1991 until July 2009. In 2002, Adler founded the CyberKnife Society of which he was president from 2002 until 2009.

In 2009, Adler founded Curēus.com (originally known as peerEmed.com), a web-based peer-reviewed medical journal that combines attributes of traditional expert review and social networks with the objective of fairly compensating reviewers and authors. Curēus.com's business model is designed to eliminate the conflicts of interest and inefficiencies inherent in the business model of traditional print based journals.

Adler was born in Yonkers, New York in 1954. He graduated from Harvard College in 1976 and Harvard Medical School in 1980. From 1980 to 1987 he did a neurosurgical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital and a radiosurgery fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, where he worked with Lars Leksell.

He is the father of Trip Adler, co-founder and CEO of Scribd.