Oscar Woolnough is an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at UTHealth Houston. He is a neuroscientist and engineer whose research focuses on how our brains are able to comprehend, learn, and produce written words. To isolate these processes, he uses recordings directly from the brain’s surface in large populations of neurosurgical patients. This is combined with cortical stimulation mapping to study the behavioral consequences of transiently disrupting these processes. His research combines basic science investigations of literacy with the translation of these findings into neurosurgical practice, developing methods to pre-surgically and intraoperatively map eloquent brain function.