Rebecca J. DeCarlo ’15

Rebecca J. DeCarlo

Rebecca is currently the chief resident of neurological surgery with Carolina Neurosurgery and Spine Associates at Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. She provides surgical care for patients with many life threatening and debilitating conditions such as brain tumors, acute spinal cord injuries, aneurysm ruptures, acute disc herniations, spine fractures, myelopathy, radiculopathy and intracranial hemorrhages. 

This past spring, Rebecca traveled to Ghana with Operation International's first neurosurgical outreach team. She worked with 2 local neurosurgeons to help establish neurosurgical care at a small rural hospital. The population of Ghana has many unmet neurosurgical needs, with citizens traveling from all over the country to seek free care. Rebecca and her team were able to perform 28 life changing surgeries for many children and adults during our time there. More importantly, the team was able to teach some of the local staff learn how to care for this very ill patient population and better support some of the local neurosurgeons as they begin to perform more surgeries at this location. Rebecca and the team plan on returning yearly and helping grow the neurosurgical outreach capabilities at this hospital.

Prior to residency, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rebecca became involved with the Coastal Georgia Health Department and their contact tracing team in an effort to help reduce the spread of COVID-19. The hope, at the time, was that this would help save lives and reduce the disease burden on already overloaded hospitals. Rebecca eventually became one of the leaders helping organize this outreach program and began designing a training manual to help other health departments across Georgia begin contact tracing programs, leading several training sessions to help extend this service across Georgia. Rebecca also assisted with the implementation of a Pandemic Medicine course at the Medical College of Georgia that helped train other medical students in contact tracing and recruit more tracers. She was then honored to be invited by the President of the United States to a special graduation event at the White House that year for students across the nation that had played a part in the country's COVID-19 response.

Rebecca’s dad always told me to do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. However, she has found that there are many people that don't have the privilege to be able to do this. Rebecca considers herself fortunate to have parents and the Georgia Hope Scholarship to financially support her pursuit to do what I loved. Rebecca found herself loving biology in Dr. Davis and Dr. Corotto's classes and loving the study of the mind in Dr Cate's psychology class. She ultimately pursued medicine at the Medical College of Georgia and discovered a love for neurological surgery and caring for the sickest of the sick patients in clinical rotations in coastal south Georgia. Rebecca is now about halfway through her residency in Neurosurgery and hopes to return to Georgia to practice in the future.