It is our great pleasure to announce that a Board Member of the Polish American Medical Society, Prof. Maria Siemionow, MD, PhD,  was elected an Honorary Trustee of the Kosciuszko Foundation.

The position of Honorary Trustee is one of the Foundation’s highest forms of recognition offered to persons who have distinguished themselves by their efforts and achievements in strengthening cultural, academic and scientific relations between the United States and Poland and persons, who have rendered substantial and significant support to promote the purposes, programs and objectives of the Foundation.

The Kosciuszko Foundation’s announcement also indicates:

Professor Maria Siemionow MD, PhD, is a world-renowned scientist, micro-surgeon and transplant pioneer. In 2008, she led a team of eight surgeons through the world’s first near-total face transplant at the Cleveland Clinic. The procedure took 22 hours and it was the most extensive face transplant to date. Only about 40 patients around the world have had a face transplant; Professor Siemionow has performed three of these surgeries.

She currently serves as Professor and Director of Microsurgery Research, University of Illinois, College of Medicine at Chicago. For 20 years she has been doing pioneering research on chimeric cells (composed of material from both the organ donor and the recipient), and she has developed several novel therapies in this field for some of previously untreatable diseases.

In the past, Maria Siemionow served as an Associate Professor of Surgery at the University of Utah and as Director of Plastic Surgery Research and Head of Microsurgical Training in the Cleveland Clinic’s Department of Plastic Surgery. She served in that capacity for 18 years from 1995 to 2013. She was appointed Professor of Surgery in the Department of Surgery at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University in 2005. In 2008 she received an honorary academic appointment as Professor of Surgery at the Karol Marcinkowski University of Medical Sciences in Poznan, Poland. 

Please, join us in congratulating Prof. M. Siemionow of such a recognition.

Respectfully yours,

Piotr Brukasz, MD
President
Polish American Medical Society