Wonderful Scientist Wednesday
Dr. Alexa Canady
Dr. Alexa Canady has always cared for each of her pediatric patients like they were her own children. As the United State’s first African American woman neurosurgeon, Alexa has helped shape a new era of medicine with compassion and innovation in a field still dominated by men.
Alexa was born in Lansing, Michigan on November 7th, 1951. Her father worked as a dentist after serving in World War II, and her mother was the president of a national sorority. From an early age Alexa’s parents inspired her to study hard and work for good grades — even though she was already a naturally gifted student. When Alexa’s grandmother took a course at a local college in psychology she took on Alexa as a guinea pig: testing her IQ and reasoning. The results were off the charts and Alexa was recognized as a bona fide genius! It wasn’t until later that her family would realize Alexa’s white school teachers had cheated her: passing off Alexa’s testing scores as a white student’s work.
The prejudice Alexa experienced was unfair, but she was driven to excel in spite of the barriers that stood in her way. First Alexa completed an undergraduate degree in zoology from the University of Michigan, graduating cum laude with honors and later she received an MD from the University of Michigan’s Medical school and an additional scholarship at Yale University.
In medical school, Alexa fell in love with the neurology and the complexities of the human brain. The challenges of surgery and problem solving delighted her as she sat at the top of her class with her pick of potential specialties. Later she would settle into the field of pediatric neurosurgery as she delighted in the opportunity to improve the lives of sick children. Alexa’s compassion, too, bounded outside the operating room as she spent hours playing with her patients and working closely with their families to provide them with the best possible care.
Although Alexa retired in 2012 her research lives on through a patent she co-created to drain fluid out of the brain! To read more about Dr. Alexa Canady through her own words, check out this article: https://www.nwlc.org/title-ix/alexa-canady.html.
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