Maria Siemionow

Maria Siemionow is a Polish transplant surgeon and scientist, born in Krotoszyn, Poland, in 1950. She is best known for leading a team of eight surgeons through the first near-total face transplant performed in the United States, at the Cleveland Clinic in 2008. The patient, Connie Culp, a woman from a small town in Ohio, had been severely disfigured by a close-range shotgun blast in 2004, and the operation took 22 hours. Siemionow practised in Cleveland until 2014, when she was appointed professor of orthopedics and director of microsurgery research at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she works today. She is regarded as a leading figure in enhancing nerve regeneration and in developing regimens that need only minimal immunosuppression after transplantation.