Where did you get your training?

I completed my plastic surgery and general surgery training at the University of Pennsylvania. I've been a member of the Cedars-Sinai medical staff since 2003.

What is your specialty?

While I perform a great deal of breast reconstruction in my private practice, I also see a lot of maxillofacial trauma cases that come through the Emergency Department at Cedars-Sinai.

What types of cases do you get from the ED?

I see a lot of victims of car accidents who suffer severe head and facial trauma.

In fact, the most difficult case I ever worked on was a young man whose face was literally pulverized in a car accident two years ago. He was a passenger in an older model car that didn't have airbags or full-coverage seatbelts. He hit the dashboard at 60 miles per hour, and his face was completely crushed from the orbital bone to the chin. He lost an eye and required a five-stage reconstruction, involving a team of several surgeons from different specialties, using bone grafts from his ribs. He completed his final surgery a few months ago and looks amazingly normal now.

Tell us about your teaching and clinical work at the Ambulatory Care Center's Adult Surgical Clinic.

On Thursday mornings, I volunteer my time at the Adult Surgical Clinic at Cedars-Sinai, which is part of the Ambulatory Care Center in the Spielberg building. There are six of us who rotate through the clinic and part of our job is to teach the general surgery residents there -- the clinic is a great teaching tool for them.

Among the patients we see in the clinic are women who are HIV-positive and suffer lipodystrophy as a result of their medication. This causes fat pockets to appear on their back, neck and shoulders, which requires plastic surgery to remove and re-insert in other areas to smooth out the skin¿s appearance. There are a growing number of these patients as people are able to live long-term with HIV. We're now starting to see the resulting side effects of taking these powerful drug "cocktails" for many years, and lipodystrophy is just one of them.