About me
Dr. Patrick Codd
Patrick James Codd, M.D., is a Harvard-trained, award-winning neurosurgeon, scientist, and Zen Buddhist priest whose career bridges cutting-edge brain surgery and ancient contemplative practice. He graduated with honors from both the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completed his neurosurgical residency and chief residency at the premier Massachusetts General Hospital, and pursued advanced training in minimally invasive brain and skull base surgery at leading international centers.
Patrick now serves as Associate Professor of Neurosurgery at Duke University School of Medicine, with additional appointments in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering. Board-certified by the American Board of Neurological Surgery and a Fellow of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, Dr. Codd has performed thousands of complex brain and skull base surgeries over the last ten years at the world-renowned Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke, guiding patients and families through life’s most profound thresholds.
I was inspired to be a doctor by my grandfather, a classic “black bag” physician, who practiced family medicine with grace, compassion, and enthusiasm I strive to emulate. Compassionate, inquisitive and skilled, he took care of countless families and patients. It may seem these days like a time gone-by, but it is fundamentally what we all yearn for in a true physician. I strive to be like him every day, and with every patient I have the privilege of caring for.
MY FAMILY
My Grandfather
Into the Blue Dragon Cave
On Dragons
The blue dragon is life’s fierce teacher — chaos and clarity, sorrow and joy, the healer and the wounded, inseparable.
To step into its cave is to face yourself, the truth of impermanence, and the fragile wonder of being alive.
My approach
The sPIRIT of
I treat everyone like I would treat my own family. Because after all, we are bound by the great interconnectedness of being human and inseparable from everything around us. It is with this mind that I approach my avocation as a physician, my calling as a Zen Buddhist Priest, my passion as an innovator for building technologies to improve the world, and as simply a human living a human life.
Alongside his surgical career, Patrick has been a devoted Zen practitioner for almost three decades. He began training at the Zen Center of Los Angeles and the Greater Boston Zen Center, was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest in 2017, and founded the Grass Hut Zen Sangha in Durham, North Carolina. He is an Associate Member of the Soto Zen Buddhist Association and a recognized teacher of meditation and presence.
For over twenty years, Patrick has woven the precision and intensity of neurosurgery with the deep vision and presence of Zen to explore what it means to walk into life’s most difficult spaces with patients and return whole.
Patrick is the founder of the Dragon Lab. The Dragon Lab offers a new model for healing the healers—uniting science, art, Zen insight and exercise in humanity within a framework of exploration, reflection, and meaningful and creative self-expression.
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