John G. Meara, MD, DMD, MBA is Plastic Surgeon-in-Chief at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is the Kletjian Professor of Global Surgery and Professor of Surgery in the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, he received his medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School, his dental degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine and his masters of business administration from the Melbourne Business School at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Dr. Meara completed his otolaryngology residency at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, and his plastic surgery training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital. He was the craniofacial fellow at The Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, and returned as the full-time director of the Department of Plastic and Maxillofacial Surgery in 2003, after working at Children’s Hospital–Los Angeles for three years. In 2005, he was promoted to Chief of Surgery at The Royal Children’s Hospital, and returned to Boston Children’s Hospital in August 2006 as Plastic Surgeon-in-Chief.
Dr. Meara is Director of the Program in Global Surgery and Social Change at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. In collaboration with Partners in Health, he is Co-Director of the Paul Farmer Global Surgery Fellowship, which trains leaders to promote surgical care, education and research pertinent to global surgery. He is a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and a member of the International Society of Craniofacial Surgery. His clinical areas of focus in craniofacial surgery include cleft lip and palate, craniosynostosis, frontonasal encephalocele and complex Tessier clefts. Dr. Meara has a particular interest in augmenting the delivery of quality surgical and anesthesia care in low-resource settings through long term capacity building. He is also interested in value based health care and implementation science research, including time driven activity based cost research and outcomes research. Dr. Meara has led several ICHOM projects focusing on outcomes reporting and international benchmarking.
As a member of the Cleft and Craniofacial Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, Dr. Meara has a special interest in cleft lip and palate and craniofacial diagnoses including syndromic and non-syndromic craniosynostosis, frontonasal encephalocele and complex Tessier facial cleft. He has worked closely with colleagues to improve patient care and education through comprehensive, cross-disciplinary approaches to the evaluation and management of patients with complex conditions. Dr. Meara has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in this field. ?
