Prof. Erkan Kaptanoğlu, M.D. graduated from Istanbul University Cerrahpasa Faculty of Medicine in 1990. He completed his 6-month internship in England at Peterborough District Hospital and Lincoln County Hospital. He began his residency in Neurosurgery in 1992 at Ankara Numune Hospital. He completed EANS training courses, which he attended for four years, in September 1996 and passed the European Board of Neurosurgery written exam. He became a Neurosurgery specialist upon completing his residency in Neurosurgery in 1997. In 1996, he went to Montreal Neurological Institute for a month by his own means. From there he visited Toronto, where he met Prof. Charles Tator, M.D. He then went to Little Rock, Arkansas where he visited Dr. Glen Pait and Prof. Gazi Yasargil, M.D. for a short time.
Upon completing his residency, he was appointed as chief resident at the same hospital. In this hospital where he worked until 2010, he personally performed and supervised the surgical operations of complex cases e.g. cranial, spinal, pediatrics, trauma and vascular neurosurgery. He worked at the Department of Anatomy in Ankara University and in research laboratories of Ankara University and Hacettepe University for the purpose of developing complex spinal surgery operations.
In 1998-1999, at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, he studied “spinal cord injury and spinal cord regeneration” with Prof. Charles Tator, M.D. as a “research fellow”. There, he conducted studies on spinal cord regeneration and bridging the injured spinal cord with peripheral nerve grafts. While maintaining an intensive clinical practice after returning to Turkey, he enrolled in a PhD program on Advanced Neurosciences at the Institute of Medical Sciences in Hacettepe University. During his PhD studies, he performed tissue and animal studies especially on the subject of neuroprotection in spinal cord injuries. He earned his Doctor of Science (PhD) degree in 2005, by completing his dissertation.
From then on, his surgical cases, clinical, cadaveric and laboratory studies, academic meetings, lectures and conferences all became part of his lifelong education.
