Dr. Leah Acker is a practicing anesthesiologist specializing in neurosurgical anesthesia and an Assistant Professor at Duke University, with appointments in Anesthesiology, Neurobiology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Psychology and Neuroscience. She leads the Anesthesiology, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Engineering Research (ACKER) Lab within Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and has mentored more than 20 trainees since joining the faculty.

Dr. Acker’s research applies neuroscience and engineering approaches to perioperative medicine, with a focus on resilience, cognition, and recovery after surgery. She has pioneered several conceptual frameworks in perioperative neuroscience, including the brain-heart-immune axis, attentional resilience, and the recently described “overwhelmed” phenotype, in which older surgical patients endorse a high burden of preoperative stressors and experience worse postoperative outcomes.

Dr. Acker received her PhD from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology before completing medical school and anesthesiology residency at Duke University, where she served as a chief resident. In addition to multiple NIH R-level awards, she received the 2025 McKnight Brain Research Foundation Innovator Award and the 2026 Duke University School of Medicine Williams Faculty Research Prize for Breakthrough Clinical Research. She is the first proceduralist at Duke to receive this distinction.