Jacqueline Greene, MD
Assistant Professor of Surgery, UCSD
Seminar Information
Injury to the facial nerve can occur from a variety of causes including tumors, stroke and trauma. Facial paralysis causes devastating physical and psychological morbidity, including blindness from incomplete eye closure, nasal obstruction, oral incompetence, and difficulty expressing facial emotions resulting in social isolation. Despite the success of neuroprosthetic devices for other clinical problems such as hearing loss, foot drop, and obstructive sleep apnea, there exists no FDA- approved device for management of facial palsy. In addition to financial challenges associated with development of medical devices for rare diseases, prior technological and methodological limitations have impeded progress in the field. The goal of this talk is to discuss the current challenges in facial reanimation surgery and in the care of facial paralysis patients and identify discrete opportunities for device development and technological innovation.
I am an Otolaryngologist-Head & Neck surgeon with advanced subspecialty training in facial reanimation and microvascular surgery. My undergraduate training was in Materials Science Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at MIT. I recently joined the Department of Head & Neck Surgery – Otolaryngology at the University of California, San Diego after completing a Facial Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery fellowship at Harvard in June 2019. I am interested in long-gap facial nerve regeneration and biomedical devices to advance treatment for patients with facial paralysis.