Tipu Aziz was a professor of functional neurosurgery at the University of Oxford and a consultant neurosurgeon at the John Radcliffe Hospital, whose primate research helped resurrect and establish neurosurgery for movement disorders, in particular subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson’s disease. Other treatments he pioneered were pedunculopontine nucleus DBS for Parkinson’s and DBS for chronic pain. He was born on 9 November 1956 in Dhaka in what was then East Pakistan. He spent his childhood moving between the USA and West Pakistan to follow his father’s career as a scientist. His father, Mohamed Aziz, was based at Merck and went on to lead the clinical trial of ivermectin to cure river blindness, work that was posthumously acknowledged by the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. His mother was Zaheda. Tipu returned to East Pakistan in the 1960s before moving to Oxford in 1973 following the post-war establishment of Bangladesh. He took his A-levels in Oxford and he went on to study physiological sciences at University College London, where highlights included seeing Andrew Huxley demonstrating axonal neurotransmission, and a chain-smoking Patrick Wall teaching gate theory in his laboratory. He obtained a first-class degree in 1978 and went on to study medicine as a graduate at King’s College London. A brutal surgical house job was followed by a senior house officer post in Birmingham, then neurosurgery in Bristol, where he first performed a radiofrequency thalamotomy for tremor. His first registrar posts were in Swansea then Cardiff. He explored doctoral research into resurrecting functional neurosurgery for movement disorders with several British potential mentors. He offered to work for free for Alan Crossman, a neuroanatomist in Manchester, who later secured him a basic scientist studentship from the Medical Research Council (MRC) to undertake an MD research degree. He was the first person in the world to surgically destroy the subthalamic nucleus in primates and thus demonstrate a new surgical target for Parkinson’s disease. Tipu struggled to find a senior registrar job until Chris Adams agreed he could pursue functional neurosurgery at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, which he did with neurology registrar Peter Silburn. He also started travelling to Charing Cross Hospital in London every Friday to do surgeries for movement disorders with neurologist Peter Bain. He became a substantive consultant on a one day a week contract at Charing Cross in 1996 while still an MRC grant holder in Oxford. By now he was world famous in functional neurosurgery. One day he complained to an Oxford consultant who replied tersely, ‘I am sure we can make you an associate specialist one day.’ He recounted the interaction to Chris Adams, who made him a substantive consultant the next day. Tipu was made professor of neurosciences at Imperial College London in 2001, three years before he was promoted to professor of neurosurgery at Oxford in 2004. As well as discovering a second DBS area for Parkinson’s, the pedunculopontine nucleus, with physiologist collaborator John Stein and DPhil student Dipankar Nandi, he developed a strong interest in neuromodulation for chronic pain, including one of the largest case series worldwide of DBS for pain. He started travelling annually to Porto with DM student Erlick Pereira to advise thalamic DBS for pain surgeries. Blood pressure changes with periaqueductal grey DBS for chronic pain led him to investigate DBS for hypertension and orthostatic hypotension, supervising MD student Alex Green, and respiratory changes with DPhil student Jonathan Hyam. Numerous visiting research collaborations, clinical fellows and professorships accrued from functional neurosurgery units he set up as far afield as Aarhus, Kolkata, Melbourne and Kuala Lumpur. Apart from the many fellows who became consultant functional neurosurgeons in the UK, Malaysia, Australia and elsewhere, he was an early supporter of nurse career progression. His first movement disorders nurse specialist Carole Joint obtained a PhD in her spare time; his pain nurse specialist Liz Moir gained a masters degree and several others became key opinion leaders in neuromodulation. Key to all this was Tipu’s kindness, generosity and passion for scientific advancement. He held numerous MRC grants and published close to 300 papers. With Pereira, he wrote the basal ganglia chapter of *Gray’s anatomy*. He was elected a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2012. In 2019 he was awarded the Society of British Neurological Surgeons’ Medal. In 2024 the British Society of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery named its lifetime achievement medal after him and awarded the first one to him. Alongside this he campaigned for and engaged in public debate about animal research, at some risk to his personal safety. Beyond neurosurgery, Tipu enjoyed exotic cuisine, microlight flying, spotting military planes and rock music. Who can forget his loud Meatloaf and Chemical Brothers sets in the operating theatre? He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books with an encyclopaedic knowledge of and passion for history. He combined all this with a wit as sharp as his tenotome. His final three years were blighted by a head injury from which he made a remarkable recovery. He then had a short battle with oesophageal cancer, to which he succumbed on 25 October 2024. His wife Jocelyn and daughter Laila, from his first marriage to Rosemary (née Bowyer), were the lucky recipients of his great humour and generosity.