Humans have an insatiable need to create and change things, and Alexandra is no exception. That impulse has accompanied her throughout life - not as a hobby, but as a way of seeing and of being.

She earned her visual arts degree in Maine, where the landscape pulled her attention downward, towards what she came to call the “microlandscape” - the quiet world of lichen, fungi, and mosses persisting for thousands of years, indifferent to the bickering of the animals with whom they share this Earth. It was a formative discovery - beauty and resilience often live closest to the ground, and can be seen everywhere and in everything.

But the solitude of an artist’s life was not yet a match for Alexandra’s extroverted spirit. With a teacher for a mother, service was in her nature. Between college and graduate school, she worked at a high needs charter school, tutoring former dropouts as they worked their way back to a diploma. She went on to earn her dental degree in Boston, where she was an Albert Schweitzer Fellow for Public Service, again working with high schoolers pursuing a career in dentistry.

For Alexandra, being a doctor has always meant protecting what she believes matters most to human beings: their curiosity and safety, their gentleness and kindness, and their capacity to continue to love.