Nathan R. Selden, M.D., Ph.D., was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Oregon, where his father was Vice Chair of Cardiology at Oregon Health & Science University. He graduated from Exeter and With Distinction from Stanford, winning the Dean's Award for Service, election to Phi Beta Kappa, and the Dinkelspiel Commencement Award. He spent three years as a British Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University, completing a Ph.D. in neuroscience and rowing for Jesus College. At Harvard Medical School, he was awarded the John E. Thayer Scholarship and graduated cum laude in neuroanatomy. Dr. Selden trained at the University of Michigan under Drs. Julian Hoff, Karin Muraszko, William Chandler, and John McGillicuddy. His post-doctoral work on human basal ganglia anatomy received the 1998 American Academy of Neurological Surgery Resident Award. He also served as a pediatric neurosurgery fellow at Northwestern University.

Dr. Selden is Chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery at Oregon Health & Science University, where he holds the endowed Campagna Chair of Pediatric Neurosurgery. He is also Chair of the OHSU Professional Board, responsible for credentialing and privileging, quality and safety, and professional standards for 1900 clinicians. His clinical focus is pediatric neurosurgery, including epilepsy and craniofacial disorders. Dr. Selden's scientific work on pain modulatory centers in the amygdala and brainstem has been funded by the NIH, the Oregon Child Health Research Center, and the Cameron Family Foundation. In November 2006, he performed the first implantation of neuronal stem cells in a human patient, as co-Principal Investigator of a trial treating Batten's Disease. He is also interested in clinical evidence regarding spinal dysraphism and has served three times as an author of the Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury Guidelines. Dr. Selden is the inaugural series editor for eight 'Neurosurgery by Example' textbooks from Oxford University Press, for which he also edited the Pediatric Neurosurgery volume. Dr. Selden was Secretary and then President of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons.

He is currently a Director of the American Board of Neurological Surgery, a member of the American Academy of Neurological Surgery, the American Society of Pediatric Neurosurgeons, the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, and the Harvard Aesculapian Society, and is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Dr. Selden is currently Secretary of the SNS and has previously served as Chair of the Committee on Resident Education (CoRE), Chair of the PGY1 Boot Camp Courses Subcommittee and founding national course director, 2012 Annual Meeting Program Chair, and as founding Editor of the SNS Program Director's Toolkit. He is also Chair of the ACGME Milestones Group for Neurological Surgery and, in 2013, received the ACGME Parker Palmer Courage to Teach Award. Dr. Selden is married to his medical school classmate, Dr. Karen Selden, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon. His interests include skiing and hiking with their three children in the Oregon Cascades, mystery novels, Italian language and culture, and the history of medicine. With classicist, Nigel Nicholson, he authored 'The Rhetoric of Medicine: Lessons on Professionalism from Ancient Greece' (Oxford University Press, 2019).