Rafael De La Garza Ramos, MD

Rafael De la Garza Ramos, MD, is Director, Spine Research at Montefiore Einstein and Assistant Professor, Neurosurgery at our Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. De la Garza’s clinical focus centers on complex spine surgery, including primary and metastatic tumors of the spine, spine deformity and salvage procedures.

After earning his Doctor of Medicine at the Ignacio A. Santos School of Medicine at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2013, Dr. De la Garza came to the United States to continue his medical training. He completed a postdoctoral clinical research fellowship at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2016, followed by a residency in neurosurgery at Montefiore Einstein in 2023. Dr. De la Garza then completed a complex spine surgery fellowship at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in 2024.

Dr. De la Garza’s research focuses on spine oncology, particularly the impact of frailty on surgical outcomes, adverse event prediction, biomechanics of spinal reconstruction in cancer patients and cancer health disparities. Dr. De la Garza has over 200 peer-reviewed publications and holds an h-index of 40. His work has also been presented as both oral presentations and poster presentations at national and international meetings. He is also a reviewer for many scientific journals, including Clinical Spine Surgery, World Neurosurgery and the Journal of Bone Oncology, among others. He is also Associate Editor for Frontiers in Surgery and is on the Scientific Reports editorial board.

Dr. De la Garza is a board eligible neurosurgeon and is a member of several professional societies, including AO Spine, the North American Spine Society, the American Association for Cancer Research and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. In 2023, he received the Charles Kuntz Scholar Award at the American Association of Neurological Surgeons/Congress of Neurological Surgeons (AANS/CNS) Spine Summit.