Alexandra Giantini Larsen, MD

PrIMES Lite Director

Dr. Larsen is a a fourth-year resident in neurosurgery at Weill Cornell Medicine and has been named the 2023-2024 Neurosurgery Publications Deputy Resident Fellow by the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. 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 has been awarded grants from the Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) and NewYork-Presbyterian’s Health Justice in Action (HJA) Fund to design and impliment PrIMES Lite, a summer program for high school students with an interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Both grants are in support of Dr. Larsen’s efforts to increase diversity in neurosurgery by reaching out to high school students to encourage and motivate them toward careers in medicine.