Dr. E.J. Dos Santos Rubio-Dieben is a Dutch Angolan neurosurgeon trained at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She completed a fellowship with prof Evandro de Oliveira and Prof Feres Chaddad in 2015-2016 in micro neurosurgery and has been working in Curaçao since 2017 as a consultant Neurosurgeon, where she has devoted her time to neurosurgical capacity building in her region with support from two large academic centers in the Netherlands. Co-Founded an NGO (Umente) that creates awareness of neurological and neurosurgical diseases within the community. Currently, she is still running a solo practice at Curaçao Medical center. Since her position, she has finished an on-location spine fellowship under the supervision of prof Wilco Peul, due to the vast amount of complex degenerative spine seen on the island. Recently she has been expanding her scope to global neurosurgery. She has published papers on various topics e.g. neurotrauma, hydrocephalus management, neurooncology, spine, and most recently global neurosurgery in collaboration with Program in Global Surgery and Social Change department at Harvard University and is currently working together with neurosurgeons within the USA, Caribbean, and Africa to promote and expand global neurosurgery research. She recently co-founded the first association of Portuguese-speaking African neurosurgeons and was appointed secretary.
She is a member of several neurosurgical societies and a member of the advisory board of The Alton Paas Foundation (awareness around spinal cord injury) within Curaçao. She is passionate about building her research field within global neurosurgery to put the important neurosurgical efforts made in the Caribbean and Africa known to the big public and simultaneously focus on research within the scope of degenerative spinal disease within her population.