Current Weill Cornell Neurosurgery Residents

John Chae received his MD this year from Weill Cornell Medical College, where he was a member of Alpha Omega Alpha, the national medical student honor society. During his tenure at Weill Cornell, John was awarded the 2019 Siegel Family Student Prize for high academic achievement and leadership as well as the 2018 Marcus M. Reienberg, M.D. Award in Community Service. He received a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry from Williams College, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. John has been an active member of the Weill Cornell Medicine AANS Neurosurgery Interest Group, where he twice directed the Medical Student Neurosurgery Training Camp, and helped organize a medical student publication group.  John has served as a mentor with HPREP, designed to boost medical school enrollment rates of underrepresented groups. Among his research projects are several conducted under the mentorship of Dr. Jeffrey Greenfield on congenital brain malformations, including the creation of a novel pathophysiology-based classification system.

Jacob Goldberg, M.D., is a 2017 graduate of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. From 2014-15, Dr. Goldberg spent a year completing a Howard Hughes Medical Institute medical research fellowship. He received his medical microbiology and immunology B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012.

Dr. Goldberg has performed neuroblastoma research at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis and pediatric hematology and oncology research at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. In addition to frequently publishing and presenting his work, he actively provides community service through mentoring and tutoring initiatives.

Dr. Natasha Kharas received her MD and PhD degrees from McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. A native New Yorker, Natasha earned her undergraduate degree in neural science (with highest honors) from NYU before enrolling in the MD/PhD program at McGovern, where she was elected to the medical student honor society Alpha Omega Alpha. Dr. Kharas has been working with Dr. Casey Halpern’s lab at Stanford University to examine the role of intracranial stimulation in epilepsy, and with Dr. David Sandberg at McGovern on a translational research project examining the safety and pharmacokinetics of injecting the chemotherapy drug panobinostat directly into the fourth ventricle to treat posterior fossa tumors in children. She received an NIH F31 grant for her PhD dissertation research, which examined the neural underpinnings of how sleep improves cognitive performance; she also performed research that examined the neural basis for how unconscious visual stimuli alter behavior.

Alexandra Giantini Larsen is a graduate of Harvard Medical School, where she was vice president of the AANS medical student chapter and co-president of the Harvard Medical School chapter of the Association of Women Surgeons. She earned her bachelor’s degree with honors in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Larsen spent a year as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Medical Research Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. E. Antonio Chiocca, Chairman of Neurosurgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, where her research was focused on viral therapies for glioblastoma. She also has spent time as a researcher in the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children's Hospital with Dr. Edward Smith and in the Brain Tumor Stem Cell Laboratory at Johns Hopkins Hospital with Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa. She was an observer in our own department during her college years, when we recognized her emerging talents, and we are delighted to have her join us for her residency.