John R. Adler

John R. Adler (born 1954) is an American neurosurgeon. He is the inventor of the CyberKnife radiosurgical instrument. In 2007 he was named the Dorothy and Thye King Chan Professor of Neurosurgery at Stanford University School of Medicine. He was also the school's vice chair for innovation and technology. He is currently an emeritus professor of neurosurgery. In April 2010, Adler was appointed vice president and chief of New Clinical Applications at Varian Medical Systems.

Adler holds 9 United States patents and has authored over 180 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He is best known as the inventor of the CyberKnife Radiosurgical System, an image-guided radiosurgical robotic instrument that noninvasively ablates tumors and lesions throughout the body. In 1991 Adler founded the company Accuray to develop and manufacture the CyberKnife. He was chief executive officer from 1999 to 2002 and chief medical officer from 1991 until 2007. He also was a member of the Accuray board of directors from 1991 until July 2009. In 2002, Adler founded the CyberKnife Society of which he was president from 2002 until 2009.

In 2009, Adler founded Curēus.com (originally known as peerEmed.com), a web-based peer-reviewed medical journal that combines attributes of traditional expert review and social networks with the objective of fairly compensating reviewers and authors.

Adler was born in Yonkers, New York in 1954. He graduated at Harvard College in 1976 and at Harvard Medical School in 1980. From 1980 to 1987 he did a neurosurgical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital and a radiosurgery fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, where he worked with Lars Leksell.

He is the father of Trip Adler, co-founder and CEO of Scribd.