I completed my undergraduate studies at James Madison University where I received a B.S., cum laude in Biology. I completed medical school training at Eastern Virginia Medical School and was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society as a medical student and was President of my medical school class. I then completed an Internship in General Surgery and Residency in Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA. During this time, I became the first resident to be awarded the distinguished Leslie Bernstein Research Grant, through the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. This was a $25,000 grant used for developing injectable tissue engineered cartilage. Upon completion of residency training, I was fortunate to match into an extremely competitive facial plastic surgery fellowship with Dr. Peter Hilger at the University of Minnesota.
I am currently practicing as the Director of the Division of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in the Department of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery at Eastern Virginia Medical School. I have been the residency program director for the Department of Otolaryngology at EVMS for over 7 years. I have been recognized for being a young leader at EVMS and was awarded the Sentara/EVMS Endowed Chair for Academic Leadership Advancement.
Scholarly Interest
There are a number of areas of research that I have performed studies, including tissue engineering of cartilage, evaluating nasal base support in rhinoplasty, comparing decelullarized vs. gamma irradiated septal and costal cartilage allografts, Facial artery myomucosal flaps for nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal reconstruction. I have received a number of grants for the studies listed above. I am currently working on projects involving the evaluation of bias in residency application evaluations and evaluation of bias in residency and medical student evaluations.
I have also assumed leadership roles in a number of National organizations including being selected as a Senior Examiner for the American Board of Otolaryngology and the Secretary for the Otolaryngology Program Directors Organization Executive Council.
In my research for the Leslie Bernstein Grant, I was able to successfully generate injectable tissue engineered cartilage from nasal septal cartilage. This was injected into a mouse model and the resulting engineered cartilage resembled native cartilage both structurally and histologically. I have performed various clinical outcomes studies that have analyzed various surgical procedures such as septoplasty, rhinoplasty and facial reconstruction. These studies have also included corresponding cadaver research (nasal tip support) to correlate with patient outcomes study. I recently accepted manuscript describes my work with facial artery myomucosal flaps in pharyngeal reconstruction, specifically treating VPI and nasopharyngeal stenosis. I am in the process of submitting work describing reconstruction of intermediate sized nasal skin cancer defects.
Other interests related to my work as residency program director include the evaluation of bias in performance evaluations of residents and in an evaluation tool used to assess residency applications. We have also recently started work evaluating residents comfort level with emergency tracheotomies and the role of simulation in assisting residents in developing a comfort level with this fortunately rare occurrence of residents needing to manage emergency surgical airway situations.
