Jeffrey Victor Rosenfeld (born 19 November 1952) is an Australian neurosurgeon and professor of surgery. He is a senior neurosurgeon in the Department of Neurosurgery at The Alfred Hospital, and the Emeritus Professor of Surgery at Monash University, as well as being a retired major general in the Australian Defence Force, where he served as a medical officer and a military surgeon since 1984. His research has focussed on traumatic brain injury, bionic vision, and medical engineering. He is best known for devising an operation to remove hypothalamic Hamartoma from children's brains.
He has published over 351 peer reviewed articles and 62 book chapters. He has 36117 citations, h-index of 87 and i10-index of 287 (Google Scholar 17 June 2026).
Early life and education
Rosenfeld grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern, where he dreamed of being a doctor from the age of five, and he tended to the family cat wearing a borrowed lab coat. He attended Melbourne High School then studied medicine at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1976 with an MB BS. This was followed by surgical training at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
He went on to neurosurgical training, completing post-fellowship training at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, UK and was Chief Resident in Neurological Surgery at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Ohio, USA.
He completed a Research Fellowship at the Walter and Eliza Hall of Medical Research and obtained a Master of Surgery degree from the University of Melbourne in 1992, with his thesis "Neural transplantation in mice: immunological and neurobiological considerations”.
Medical career
Rosenfeld's first involvement with developing countries was when he travelled to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, as a trainee surgeon. He continued to make regular visits to PNG and disadvantaged countries. He has since operated on people from the US, UK, Africa, Papua New Guinea, and East Timor.
Military
Rosenfeld joined the Army Reserve in 1984.
He was sent to war-ravaged Rwanda in 1995 as part of the UN peace-keeping mission (UNAMIR II), where he was a general surgeon with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. "We had stabbings, we had gunshot wounds," he said. "We had children who'd been macheted in the head in order to murder them and had miraculously survived those injuries. In Rwanda, he also had to deal with landmine injuries and this drove him to champion the cause to ban them, working with the International Landmines Council.
By 2011 he was a brigadier. He served on eight deployments, including to Rwanda, East Timor, Bougainville, Solomon Islands and Iraq, and by 2018 he had risen to the rank of major general in the Australian Defence Force and became the Surgeon General ADF (Reserves).
Following his military medical training, Rosenfeld graduated from the Australian Reserve Command and Staff College. From 2006 to 2014, he served as Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Military and Veterans' Health, University of Queensland, contributing to research and education in military and veterans' healthcare.
Rosenfeld chaired the Australian Defence Force Human Research Ethics Committee from 2012 to 2015, overseeing the ethical review of defence-related human research. He subsequently served as Colonel Commandant of the Victoria Region of the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps (RAAMC) from 2014 to 2018, before being appointed National Colonel Commandant of the RAAMC by the Chief of Army, a position he held from 2018 to 2024.
In 2026, Rosenfeld was appointed Specialist Medical Review Councillor for Veterans' Entitlements by the Australian Government's Department of Veterans' Affairs. In this ministerial appointment, he serves on the independent body responsible for providing expert medical advice on matters relating to veterans' entitlements and compensation.
Academic
, he is Senior Neurosurgeon in the Department of Neurosurgery at The Alfred Hospital, and the Emeritus Professor of Surgery at Monash University.
In addition to his role as the Emeritus Professor of Surgery at Monash University, Rosenfeld is also adjunct professor in Surgery, F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Maryland, USA. He was Adjunct Professor (Research), Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering, Monash University, Adjunct Honorary Professor in Surgery, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Founding Director, Monash Institute of Medical Engineering (MIME), Honorary Professor of Surgery, University of Papua New Guinea, and Honorary Consultant Neurosurgeon, Longgang Central Hospital, Shenzhen, Peoples Republic of China.
Clinical and research
Rosenfeld's research has focussed on the areas of neurosurgery, traumatic brain injury, bionic vision, and medical engineering.
He pioneered the surgical technique to remove hypothalamic hamartomas from the brain. This type of tumour causes gelastic epilepsy, and they are located in a very inaccessible area inside the brain. The conventional surgical approach was to access the brain from below, because the tumour is closer to the bottom of the brain; Rosenfeld's novel approach was to access it from above, using a microscope to navigate down between the brain's hemispheres. In 1997, he performed the first such operation on 4-year-old Tom Leray-Meyer. Before the surgery, Leray-Meyer had the intellectual development of a one-year old, he could barely walk and he had fits every five to ten minutes. By 2001, his father was able to take him to see his first cricket match. The first international patient for this surgery was American Joelle Rue in May 2000, and she was followed by regular patients from overseas.
In 2001, he won international acclaim for performing life-changing surgery to remove a hypothalamic hamartoma from a nine-year-old British boy, Sebastian Selo. The technique had previously been used successfully on 18 children at that time, but Selo was the most critical; since he was a baby he suffered up to 100 epileptic fits each day and difficulty speaking, caused by a tumour the size of a grape which had grown in his brain, about down, from the top of the head, and behind his eyes. A surgery attempt in Britain four years earlier had not been successful, and caused a disabling stroke. Rosenfeld liquefied the tumour using a high-frequency aspirator so that it could then be sucked away in a four-hour operation. A year later, Selo's seizures were rare, and they did not prevent him leading a normal life. They were re-united in Great Britain when Rosenfeld visited to teach the technique to British neurosurgeons. After the attention for that success, children from around the world were coming to the Royal Children's Hospital for the same surgery and Rosenfeld personally performed over 70 of them.
Rosenfeld demonstrated the technique at several US hospitals where he was awarded The Sally Harrington Goldwater Memorial Visiting Professor Award from the Barrow Neurological Foundation, Phoenix, Arizona, USA in 2003, the LD Hupp Visiting Professorship in Paediatric Neurosurgery, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA in 2004 and the Inaugural Woodard Symposium Visiting Professorship in Neurosurgery, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, Shreveport, Louisiana USA in 2012.
He operated on the Australian celebrity Molly Meldrum after his brain injury, caused by a fall from a ladder in 2011.
In 2011, he published in The New England Journal of Medicine the first multicentre randomised controlled trial about the effectiveness of decompressive craniectomy (surgically removing a section of skull to allow the pressure from swelling to abate), compared to drug therapy.
His team has developed an artificial vision system named Gennaris that may provide a degree of sight for blind people. It uses special glasses that connect wirelessly to an implant on the surface of the brain, generating a matrix of 172 spots called "phosphenes" (to expand to 473) to allow that the person to perceive a rudimentary view of whatever is there. In July 2020, the team published a report of a trial of this technology in sheep. Human trials were planned initially with only a few volunteers, then increasing over time. Describing the level of detail they hope the devices will provide, Rosenfeld said "They won't be able to recognise the detail of a person's face... but they will be able to recognise where a staircase is, where a door or door handle is, common things you need to navigate... in everyday life."
Neurotrauma and public service Rosenfeld's principal academic and clinical interests are in neurotrauma, traumatic brain injury, and trauma systems. He served on the National Trauma Committee of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS) from 1993 to 2018 and was subsequently appointed an Emeritus Member. Between 2000 and 2003, he served on the Victorian State Trauma Committee following appointment by the Minister for Health. He also served on the Victorian Ministerial Working Party and Task Force on Emergency Services and Trauma, the Consultative Committee on Road Traffic Fatalities, and the Medical Standards Committee of Ambulance Victoria from 2003 to 2016.
Rosenfeld chaired the Trauma Committee of the Neurosurgical Society of Australasia from 2000 to 2005. In recognition of his contributions to trauma care and research, he was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Jamieson Trauma Institute at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital and the Queensland University of Technology in 2018.
Rosenfeld has contributed to the development of international clinical practice guidelines for traumatic brain injury. He was a member of the multidisciplinary expert panel that produced the second edition of the Brain Trauma Foundation Guidelines for the Management of Penetrating Traumatic Brain Injury, published in Neurosurgery in 2026, including the accompanying treatment algorithms. He also contributed to the Brain Trauma Foundation Guidelines for the Management of Moderate and Severe Traumatic Brain Injury in Austere and Combat Environments.
Beyond medicine, Rosenfeld has held leadership roles in higher education, civic organisations, and veterans' affairs. He served as President of the Graduate Union of the University of Melbourne from 2012 to 2015. Between 2001 and 2004, he was National Vice-President and Victorian President of the United Nations Association of Australia.
His community service has been recognised by several civic organisations. He was awarded Honorary Membership of the Chadstone–East Malvern Rotary Club in 2007, the Melbourne Rotary Vocational Service Award in 2008, was named a Paul Harris Fellow in 2011, received the Paul Harris Fellow with Sapphire recognition from Bentleigh Rotary in 2012, and was awarded the Monash Medal by Melbourne Rotary in 2012. In 2015, he received the Returned and Services League (RSL) ANZAC of the Year Award.
Public health advocacy
Rosenfeld has used his public profile to speak out on matters of violence and social justice.
In 2008, together with psychiatrist Major Nick Ford, he warned about unidentified brain injuries which returned military suffer, caused by pressure waves from explosions. More concerning, there could be a cumulative effect from exposure to multiple explosions. But there are no external wounds to see, so these injuries are often not detected. In Afghanistan, these invisible injuries make up some 12 per cent of wounds inflicted on Australian troops. In 2011, he organised an international conference on the topic, explaining that it can leave victims with brain damage, depression, and post-traumatic stress. In 2009, he compiled a collection of brain scans to show young people how just one blow to the head can be fatal, or lead to lifelong brain injury.
He was the keynote speaker at the 2020 Holocaust Remembrance Day, comparing it to the Rwandan genocide which he witnessed personally as a military surgeon.