His whole office and staff - from the front desk, to his right-hand physician's assistant Shelene Yoshida (who was at all my appointments and assisted with the surgery) - is so well run, it inspires confidence.
He's also the head of the Tumor Board, which Dr. V. is also on. A bunch of the best minds discussed my tumor. Even if it doesn't help me directly, their work will help many others in the future.
If you understand genetics or chemistry, check out his research (Here's a link to his published articles: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=DetailsSearch&term=Foltz+G&log$=activity!)
Here's what my brother-in-law Roger said about it:
"Your surgeon's research looks fascinating and very much at the bleeding edge of what people are doing. The problem of sorting out the genetic and proteomic and genetic regulatory and cell signaling markers of all the different normal and abnormal cell types in human bodies is very much the longest march that medicine, or any other discipline, has ever undertaken. Every different somatic cell type has its own paths to going rogue, which are tied into the paths which led to it being different from other cell types in the first place, which is essential to us having bodies composed of so many different cell types all, at best, cooperating or, at least, coexisting together. It is a finite set of possibilities to be worked out, but a very large finite set. That your surgeon is so connected to the research means that your tumor's tissue will become part of the body of evidence that will eventually decide the correct ways to treat this kind of malignancy."
Profile: http://www.swedish.org/Physicians/Gregory-Foltz
There's a nice YouTube video of him at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXmMwv1zwHo
More YouTube videos, including "How does someone get brain cancer?", "Genes Hold Important Information in Treating Brain Cancer" and others at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6Z5rNB0SKA