While most 14-year-old boys generally don’t have an inkling as to what career they want to pursue as adults, Dr. Mark Lee already had made up his mind that he was going to do brain surgeries.

“My father was a psychiatrist, and when I was in elementary school I had to do a class project that examined the central nervous system of the human body. So my dad helped me with that and I became fascinated with the brain,” Lee recalls. “And then in the eighth grade I read an article about a neurosurgeon from Montreal who removed pituitary brain tumors through the nose. I thought that was amazing. I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ ”

The 50-year-old Los Alamos, N.M. native has fulfilled his childhood dream of operating on the brain more so than he probably could have ever imagined. As a pediatric neurosurgeon at Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas, which he joined in January 2009, he is making his mark in the research and treatment of epilepsy surgery.

It all began, however, as a resident at New York University Medical Center in the Department of Neurosurgery from 1988-1993. Lee began to notice a common pattern involving those afflicted with epilepsy, mainly that patients whom staff was evaluating for treatment plans and possible surgery suffered from intractable epilepsy since childhood.

“While the surgery was frequently successful, and we were able to stop their seizures, we were not able to change their lives very much in that they never developed normal social skills, and were not able to be employed since they never had the opportunity for normal education and training,” Lee says. “So my thought at that time was, ‘Why don’t we address the problem of intractable epilepsy while patients are children.’

“Therefore we can have a profound impact on their lives. Then they can go to school, have more normal social development, and not have the burden of seizures while they are growing up. I had already decided that I wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon, but went to a mentor and told him that what I really wanted to do was epilepsy surgery on children. He told me that I was crazy because no one would agree to do brain surgery for epilepsy in children.”

During his years at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, where he became a professor and chair of the Department of Neurosurgery, Lee was instrumental in expanding the epilepsy program for children.

“When I started there as a pediatric neurosurgeon and an epilepsy surgeon, we did about 80 epilepsy surgeries per year with under five of those surgeries being in children,” he says. When I left I was doing 150 epilepsy surgeries a year. About 120 of those were on kids. It’s changed dramatically because of the time, effort and interest of the people who saw it was a good idea to operate on kids instead of waiting for them to be adults.”

Lee discusses a recent case involving Aahlaya Mayberry, a 17-month-old girl who suffered a stroke at birth on the right side of her brain. She experienced about 20 seizures every hour, so the neurosurgeon performed a hemispherotomy. It is a version of a hemispherectomy in which the whole half of the brain which is damaged is removed.

However, in a hemispherotomy, instead of removing the whole half of the brain, “we actually leave it in, but do a completely disconnect the damaged half of the brain from the other parts of the brain including the healthy side, the basal ganglia, thalamus and brainstem. Thus, the patient’s normal parts of the brain are no longer affected by seizures, and the patient becomes seizure-free.”

Lee adds that a hemispherotomy is technically a much more difficult operation than a hemispherectomy (removal), but it is safer for the patient with less blood loss and faster recovery. This was the first hemispherectomy-type operation done in Central Texas.

“She now has zero seizures,” he says of young Aahlaya. “If she remains seizure free after a year, the prognosis is good. She’ll be able to walk and run although she won’t have fine control of her fingers and toes. It will significantly impact the brain development in a positive way, and there are excellent chances she will have a normal intellect.”

Caresa Mayberry, Aahlaya’s mother, says she was skeptical when Lee described the procedure that he was going to perform on her daughter and didn’t really believe that the risky operation could improve Aahlaya’s condition.

“He told me that she would be able to walk and crawl after the surgery,” Caresa says, “but I thought he was just saying that to cheer me up. Now she can crawl a little and roll over and we’re working on getting her to walk.

“As a mother it hurts to not be able to help your child, so for Dr. Lee to come into our lives is something I will always be grateful for. He has always been so caring and thoughtful. And for him to do the type of surgeries that he does is amazing.”

Dr. Timothy George, chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery/Neuroscience at Dell Children’s, describes his colleague as a nationally-recognized pediatric neurosurgeon. One of Lee’s greatest accomplishments, include salvaging a fledgling division of neurosurgery at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta by rescuing the residency program from probation and turning the program from a division of the Department of Surgery to its own independent and successful Department of Neurosurgery.

“He also began a process of redeveloping the business model of health care delivery by partnering the hospital and physicians in purpose and in performance (quality and finances),” George says. “Mark is also a pioneer in epilepsy surgery and helped start the first NIH (National Institutes for Health) funded Human Brain Lab which investigates mechanisms of injury and recovery from epilepsy and stroke in humans. It’s a coup to recruit him to Austin.”

George adds that Lee currently is helping develop the business partnership models between the Seton Family of Hospitals and the physicians along with establishing a Comprehensive Epilepsy Center for the care of children and adults suffering from epilepsy.

“My goal is to build a world-class pediatric epilepsy center,” Lee says “It will require the right people and energetic partners in neurology who specialize in epilepsy.”

The neurosurgeon also is involved in academic medicine at Dell Children’s that includes establishing a Human Brain Laboratory to study the biology of epilepsy, as he did in Georgia. Another area of research involves working with brain tissue to develop medicines to help stroke victims.

“There are about 80 drugs that can cure strokes in rats, but not for people,” he says. “My idea is if we have live brain tissue we can do testing of those medications. There is very little data on human brain tissue. The goal is to validate those models on humans and test pharmaceutical agents on people.”

Epilepsy affects about 1 percent of the population, or 4 million people in the United States, Lee explains. Although medication is prescribed to control seizures, about half of those suffering from epilepsy do not respond to multiple medications.

“We try to find the area of the brain where the seizure is occurring and try to remove it,” Lee says. “Epileptic surgery has been around since the ‘40s and ‘50s. In the last 10 years, surgery has become a much more accepted way to treat epilepsy not controlled with medication.”

Incidentally, here’s a bit of trivia for ‘80s dance music fans. Lee’s wife is the former singer Regina, whose 1986 single “Baby Love” reached No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. The couple has four children: Gabriel, 18; Olivia, 16; Carmen, 12; and Lulu, 9.

Lee earned his medical degree at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and did his residency in neurosurgery at New York University Medical Center, as well as a fellowship in pediatric neurosurgery at New York University. He completed his epilepsy surgery fellowship at the Medical College of Georgia. He is board certified by the American Board of Neurological Surgery and the American Board of Pediatric Neurological Surgery.

Meanwhile, Lee did get to fulfill another childhood dream on his path to become a neurosurgeon – removing pituitary brain tumors through the nose, which he began doing as a resident at New York University Medical Center and primarily at the Medical College of Georgia.

“It actually is a pretty boring operation, and I don’t like doing it too much,” he says. “But you know, as a kid, it sounded really cool.”