Alexa Canady was the first woman and the first African American to become a neurosurgeon.
She was born in Lansing, Michigan in 1950 to parents who were graduates of black colleges – her father from the Meharry Medical College School of Dentistry and her mother from Fisk University.
She and her brother were the only black students at the local schools where she graduated as a National Achievement Scholar in 1967.
Canady entered the University of Michigan as a math major, but when the opportunity arose, she transferred into the school’s pre-med program.
She graduated in 1971 and was accepted into Michigan’s College of Medicine where she graduated magna cum laude in 1975.
Canady interned at New Haven Hospital, Yale’s primary teaching hospital, before she became America’s first female and first black neurosurgeon as a resident at the University of Minnesota.
