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For Dr. Justiss Kallos, the pull toward neurosurgery didn't arrive in a single dramatic moment. It built slowly, through a winding path that started with a fascination with the human mind and ended, unexpectedly, in the operating room.
"I actually started out very interested in psychology and understanding human behavior and the mind," says Dr. Kallos, Assistant Professor of Neurological Surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine and Assistant Attending Neurological Surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian. That early interest evolved into neuroscience during college, then into a career that would combine both research and clinical care. What she didn't expect was how much she would love the operating room itself.
A pivotal two-week elective during her second year at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine changed everything. Working alongside Dr. Lola Chambless, a female neurosurgeon who invested heavily in teaching, Dr. Kallos got her first real exposure to the technical side of surgery. Even so, she was hesitant to commit right away. Neurosurgery meant seven years of residency, one of the longest and most demanding training paths in medicine.
"Nothing else measured up," she says of the specialties she considered before ultimately choosing neurosurgery. "At the end of the day, seven years wasn't that long, because I was most likely going to specialize anyway."
Dr. Kallos completed her neurosurgery residency at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, one of the largest programs in the country, training across five hospitals alongside 27 fellow residents. Being one of few women in the field was, for the most part, not something she noticed day to day. But she's candid about the ways it showed up in specific ways—some of them as simple as equipment.
"I'm only five-one, and a lot of instruments are not really geared towards women," she explains. Learning to safely position patients, leverage her body weight in the operating room and adapt spine instruments to fit her frame were skills she had to figure out largely on her own. "There was no one there to teach me that. I'm very fortunate now to be teaching in a residency program where there are quite a few women, and that's one of the things I try to emphasize. They can do all of these things. You just have to figure out how."
She also remembers moments when the difference was less subtle. Early in her training, when she expressed interest in general spine surgery, someone suggested she'd need to hire a male physician assistant for "muscle in the OR."
"For the record, I do not have a male PA as my muscle in the OR," Dr. Kallos says. "And I think we're doing just fine."
Throughout medical school and residency, Dr. Kallos's partner, Dave, was a constant, even while living apart for years as his career kept him in the South. The two met as undergraduates at Emory University. The long distance came with challenges, but it also gave her a way to compartmentalize demanding call schedules and protect the time they did have together.
Dr. Kallos had her daughter during her elective year of residency, becoming the second woman in her program to have a child during training. The first had asked for a formal maternity leave policy; the department offered two weeks. "She said, 'I don't think that's going to work,'" Dr. Kallos recalls. There was no real standard in place yet, but she says that's changing, aided in part by advances like portable pumps that let new mothers continue operating while still nursing.
"I couldn't do that even five years ago," she says. "I think more and more of these things are going to become accessible. We just need more women doing it, talking about it and teaching other people how they can balance motherhood with their career in medicine."
Since joining Weill Cornell Medicine in 2025, Dr. Kallos has focused on complex spine conditions, including spine deformity and spine tumors. She works closely with oncologists and radiation oncologists to determine the best path for each patient, whether that means surgery, radiation or a combination of both. Dr. Kallos points to the support network and resources at Weill Cornell that help her take great care of her patients. The department strongly emphasizes surgical innovation, including access to technologies like carbon fiber screws that improve radiation targeting for cancer patients.
She's also begun exploring next-generation tools, including a robotic platform in use in the department for extremely fine microsurgical work. "There's so much potential there," she says.
Asked what she'd tell a medical student considering neurosurgery, Dr. Kallos doesn't sugarcoat the demands of the field. "You will find yourself challenged in ways you were not expecting," she says. But she's equally clear that it’s worth it. For young women especially, she feels optimistic.
"There are a lot more women every year in neurosurgery and spine surgery," she says. More programs are supporting residents through pregnancy and early parenthood, and the informal knowledge-sharing among women in the field, from how to pump during a case to how to navigate leave policies that don't yet exist, is filling gaps that training programs haven't caught up to yet.
"No one taught my co-resident who had a baby first how to be a mom and how to pump," Dr. Kallos says. "I learned from her experience, because she was very frank. I think these experiences need to be shared so that people can do it."
It's a philosophy she's carrying into her own mentorship, at Weill Cornell and beyond: be honest about what's hard, share what works and keep making the path a little easier for the next person walking it.
Learn more about Dr. Kallos here.
