Sertac Kirnaz MD

Dr Sertac Kirnaz earned his medical degree from Kocaeli University Faculty of Medicine, Kocaeli, Turkey, in 2018. Immediately after his graduation, Dr Kirnaz joined Weill Cornell Medicine as a research fellow under the mentorship of Dr Roger Härtl. He has published more than a dozen articles and several book chapters, and he was awarded a 2019 Charlie Kuntz Scholar Award given by the Joint Section on Disorders of the Spine and Peripheral Nerves (DSPN) of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons.

Within the fellowship, Dr Kirnaz is spearheading several projects aimed at finding new methods of biological treatment for degenerative disc diseases. Dr Kirnaz’s work currently focuses on total disc replacement by tissue-engineered intervertebral discs in a translational porcine animal model as well as annular repair in the ovine lumbar spine, using a photo crosslinked high-density collagen gel. These projects are realized in close collaboration with the biomedical engineering of Cornell University in Ithaca under the mentorship of Lawrence J. Bonassar, PhD. Apart from these basic science projects, Dr Kirnaz is contributing to the development of innovative surgical techniques to treat complex spine pathologies and investigating the clinical outcomes of 3D-navigated minimally invasive spinal surgeries.