Interdisciplinary Cleft Care

Usama S. Hamdan, MD, FICS, is President and Co-Founder of Global Smile Foundation, a 501C3 Boston-based non-profit foundation that provides comprehensive and integrated pro bono cleft care for underserved patients throughout the world. He has been involved with outreach cleft programs for over three decades. Dr. Hamdan is an Otolaryngologist/Facial Plastic Surgeon with former university appointments at Harvard Medical School, Tufts University School of Medicine and Boston University School of Medicine. ***** Dr. Rogers-Vizena is a pediatric plastic and craniofacial surgeon at Boston Children's Hospital, Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, and Associate Clinical Director for Special Effects and Materials Science in the Boston Children's Simulator program. Her clinical areas of expertise include cleft lip and palate, velopharyngeal dysfunction, facial trauma, adolescent breast surgery, and spina bifida. Dr. Rogers-Vizena leads Boston Children's cleft outcomes program with inter-institutional collaborations nationally and internationally through the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement aimed at optimizing the physical and psychosocial impact of cleft lip and palate. In addition, she has partnered with the Global Smile Foundation to provide cleft care to underserved populations in the Middle East. ***** Raj Vyas earned his B.S. in Biology with Honors and Distinction from Stanford University and completed his M.D. at UCLA where he was awarded the Stafford L. Warren Medal for most outstanding medical student and the Longmire Medal for most outstanding student in surgery. He then completed integrated plastic surgery residency at Harvard and Craniofacial Fellowship at New York University. Dr. Vyas is a professor of plastic surgery at UC Irvine School of Medicine, where he serves as Vice-Chair for the Department of Plastic Surgery and Chief of Pediatric Plastic Surgery at CHOC Children's Hospital. His clinical and research interests include characterizing neonatal sleep and breathing disturbances, enhancing recovery after cleft/craniofacial surgery, understanding patient-reported psychosocial outcomes, and using technology to facilitate knowledge and skill transfer. Aligned with his passion for enhancing global capacity for interdisciplinary cleft care, Dr. Vyas is Co-Director of Global Smile Foundation's International Research Fellowship and Co-Director of Research for Plastic Surgery Foundation's SHARE program (Surgeons in Humanitarian Alliance for Reconstruction Research and Education). Dr. Vyas actively serves on dozens of regional, national and international cleft committees, hospital consortia, and journal editorial boards. ***** Brian Sommerlad qualified in medicine in Sydney, Australia. He went to the UK in 1968 to further his training and stayed. He is an honorary consultant plastic surgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, London. He has been caring for children with clefts for 45 years - in the UK and by regularly working with colleagues in many less privileged countries over the last 22 years.His ongoing research interests have centred around palate anatomy and function and attempting to improve the speech outcomes of palate repair. He was co-founder in 2007 and is chairman of the UK charity CLEFT which funds research into the causes and treatment of clefts and supports cleft centres in several low-resource countries. ***** David W. Low, MD, is Professor of Surgery at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Attending Surgeon in the Division of Plastic Surgery at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, he completed all of his surgical training at Penn and was privileged to learn cleft care under the mentorship of Don LaRossa and Peter Randall. He is the medical director of his CHOP-based international cleft team Smiles for Guatemala. In addition to his teaching and patient care responsibilities, he is a board-certified medical illustrator whose work appears in many medical journals and textbooks.