Current Weill Cornell Neurosurgery Residents

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.

Lily McLaughlin received her MD in 2024 from Georgetown University School of Medicine, where she was a member of the Gold Humanism Honor Society. We met Lily last summer, when she completed a sub-internship month that showed her to be extremely talented, responsible, and committed to patient care. Prior to medical school, Lily earned a master’s degree in biomedical studies at Drexel University after completing her bachelor’s degree in biology at Villanova. She has co-authored numerous academic research papers, many of them with colleagues from Memorial Sloan Kettering, where she spent three years as a clinical research associate. She has researched and presented on healthcare disparities and participated in mentoring programs and community health initiatives.

Kate Rosen was raised by two teachers and grew up in Salem, Oregon, on a healthy diet of art museums, hiking trips, and Tom Petty. As an undergraduate she attended Santa Clara University, where she studied chemistry, biology, and public health while also working as a volunteer EMT. After graduating, she worked in quality improvement at Stanford Children's Health using clinical informatics and systems-based thinking to improve healthcare. She then received her MD from the Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine, where she was a member of Alpha Omega Alpha, the national medical student honor society, and of the Gold Humanism Honor Society, which recognizes senior medical students for excellence in compassionate clinical care. Dr. Rosen has been a mentor to students under-represented in medicine and is one of the founders of The Differentialists, a student group formed to build diagnostic reasoning skills. Her research has included studying delayed cerebral ischemia after pituitary macroadenoma resection, and her study of fluid overload in pediatric ICU patients was named Best Abstract by a Trainee at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). She strives to specialize in neuro-oncology, with a focus on clinical trials and immunotherapy. In her free time Dr. Rosen likes to run marathons and climb mountains.

Dr. Nalini Tata received her medical degree from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, where she was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha medical student honor society, with a concurrent Master of Public Policy (MPP) degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Dr. Tata received her undergraduate degree in neurobiology from Brown University, then earned a Master of Philosophy degree from the University of Cambridge in England before enrolling in medical school. As a student researcher with Dr. Rees Cosgrove at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, she helped study asleep DBS practices and outcomes. She has also written about ethics and philosophy of neurosurgical practice during and beyond the time of the Covid-19 pandemic with Dr. Nader Dahdaleh at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.