Dr. Avital Harari is a highly experienced, board certified Endocrine Surgeon.  She is widely published in her field and is one of the top Endocrine Surgeons in the United States. Dr. Harari is currently Professor and Vice Chair of Ambulatory Surgery in the Department of Surgery at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.

She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999, graduating with Highest Honors and as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa National Honor Society.

Thereafter, she received her medical degree with distinction at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis in 2004, graduating in the top 10% of her medical school class. She completed her general surgery residency at the prestigious Columbia University in New York City in 2009 prior to completing the premier Endocrine Surgery fellowship in the United States at the University of California, San Francisco in 2010.

In 2022, she completed an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management with an Outstanding Academic Excellence Award (top 2% of her class).

Dr. Harari has received many academic honors at all levels of her education and has a growing bibliography. Dr. Harari’s clinical and research interests include the multidisciplinary management of benign and malignant tumors of the adrenal, thyroid, and parathyroid glands as well as the neuroendocrine pancreas. She is also interested in familial endocrine disorders (such as multiple endocrine neoplasia).

She offers a wide range of unique services including retroperitoneal or transabdominal laparoscopic adrenalectomy, mini-incision thyroid and parathyroid surgery, central and modified lateral neck dissection, and laparoscopic removal of pancreatic tumors.

Dr. Harari was the first to bring to UCLA and to Southern California a new technique called laproscopic retroperitoneal adrenalectomy, which offers removal of the adrenal from the back, minimizing scars.  She trained in Germany and taught the current endocrine surgeons at UCLA how to perform this technique.  She also brought other new techniques to UCLA such as ultrasound guided methylene blue dye injection for removal of recurrent thyroid cancers, cryopreservation of parathyroid tissue, parathyroid tissue aspiration techniques (in lieu of frozen section). She brought new new technologies to improve parathyroid imaging, such as the parathyroid CT scan to UCLA.

Dr. Harari is an expert in thyroid, parathyroid, and adrenal surgery. She has performed over 2500 endocrine surgical procedures – from the simplest parathyroid surgery to the most complicated open paraganglioma surgeries. She performs all her own complex neck dissections, and her complication rate is among the lowest in the country.

Recently, Dr. Harari was also recruited to become the medical correspondent for Beond.tv. Check out some of her recent interviews here.

Dr. Harari speaks Spanish and Hebrew fluently.

Research:

Dr. Harari is also actively involved in Endocrine Surgical research, and to further her education, while faculty at UCLA, completed a Master of Science degree in Clinical Research at UCLA in 2013. She has published extensively within the Endocrinology and Endocrine Surgery fields.  Here is her current list of publications:

Dr. Harari’s publications

Her research has focused primarily on risk factors for thyroid cancer, including demographic variables and environmental influences.  She was awarded a prestigious grant for investigating the effect of pesticides on thyroid cancer.  She has presented her research at the national meetings of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons, the Endocrine Society, the American Thyroid Association, The Pacific Coast Surgical Association, and the Association for Academic Surgery.

Honors

Dr. Harari has been named a 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 Castle Connolly Top Doctor. She has also been named a 2013, 2014, and 2015 Super Doctor Rising Star, which  is voted on by peers and recognizes the top 2.5% of physicians in the country.  She then was named a 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 Super Doctor. She was also named one of America’s Top Surgeons and one of the Top 100 Health professionals of the world (2018) and a Top Doctor (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024).

Teaching:

Dr. Harari has a passion for teaching, mentorship, and research, and through those activities, has significantly improved the medical student and general surgery residency programs at UCLA.  As a proponent of women in surgery, she created (alongside another female faculty member) one of the most successful Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion extracurricular programs in UCLA history called the Women in Surgery program, which inspires, encourages, and enables female medical students to enter surgical fields, and provides mentorship to students, residents, and faculty. 

She has represented UCLA in several women leader conferences such as Lean In UC.

Global Health:

Dr. Harari has a passion for global health and has practiced medicine in 6 continents.  She has set up international exchanges with medical students, surgical residents, and surgical faculty all over the world.  She has volunteered her time extensively in most of the developing world.  She co-created the UCLA general surgery residency’s first global surgery program, which sends trainees to hospitals in developing countries in various parts of the world. She is a committee member of international surgical organizations and has spoken internationally at conferences throughout the world.

Professional Organizations:

Dr. Harari is a member of the following organizations and serves on national committees within many of them:

Most of all, Dr. Harari is a loving wife and mother to two amazing boys, which makes life very busy!

She absolutely loves to travel and has been to over 50 countries. Start talking to her about your latest adventure, and she can talk with you for hours. She can even give you advice on your next trip!

She is an avid artist and painter as well.