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For Visiting Medical Students

Visiting medical students are included as an integral part of the UCI plastic surgery team. Students round daily with the residents in the morning, and they actively participate in outpatient clinics and a variety of surgeries throughout the course of their stay. UCI Medical Center includes trauma and reconstruction of all anatomic areas. Students work with plastic surgeons who focus on various subdisciplines of the field, including aesthetics, breast, face, and hand. We include students actively in a wide range of operative cases at this renowned teaching institution for an unparalleled educational experience.

On Monday evenings, medical students are invited to take part in CORE, where didactic plastic surgery teaching is presented, as well as relevant clinical cases. Students are also welcomed to take part in educational cadaveric anatomy labs and saw bones sessions, as these hands-on labs occur on a regular basis for our residents. Labs are presented in a relatively small group setting to allow for more personalized instruction to all trainees from faculty plastic surgeons.

Students are also welcome to spend time at CHOC (Children’s Hospital of Orange County), where the full breadth of pediatric plastic surgery is performed. The experience includes exposure to reconstruction for craniofacial (including cleft lip and palate, craniosynostosis) and upper extremity congenital anomalies (including syndactyly, macrodactyly, duplicate digits, obstetrical brachial plexus palsy) and other syndromic conditions, acquired conditions and trauma.

We welcome medical students to visit UC Irvine to experience an excellent educational opportunity! We would love to meet you.

UCI’s Residency Program

The mission of our training program is to provide state-of-the art, high quality plastic surgery care, education, and research in an environment that promotes and nurtures the best academic, clinical, ethical, and moral growth for its trainees and students.

Our ultimate goal is to graduate plastic surgeons who are:

of high ethical and moral standards
highly skilled, clinically and academically
committed to serving their patients, their community, and their specialty
successful in their certification by The American Board of Plastic Surgery
future leaders of national academic plastic surgery programs and specialty organizations.

The Department of Plastic Surgery at the University of California Irvine has been approved for a fully integrated residency program.

The program currently accepts three medical students per year for a six-year educational training experience in Plastic Surgery. Educational oversight of this program will be under the direction of the Department of Plastic Surgery.

The goals and objectives of this program are to educate plastic surgeons who are analytical and scholarly in their approach to surgical problem solving, broadly experienced in all fields of the specialty, safe in their application of judgment and technique, and ultimately self-educating in a lifelong continuing medical education process.

Our goals and teaching philosophy are based on the graduate school model, which emphasizes analytic problem solving, scholarly use of the knowledge base and scientific resources of the field, development of judgment skills, and identification of educational tools that produce the ability to self-direct one’s lifelong professional education in a scholarly manner.

Our approach contrasts with surgical programs that focus only on endpoints of training in current techniques and acquisitions by memory of a current knowledge base.

Our goals go far beyond this by teaching the principles and techniques of scholarship that allow one to continue to define, test and use optimal practices at any point in time.

Achieving these goals requires a great degree of interaction between the attending and the resident. The faculty must constantly encourage and require resident analytic thinking in surgical problem solving, resident application of the scientific method of data analysis, and resident use of a sound physiologic basis for surgical practice.

Our approach requires substantial input of basic science knowledge and research skills, much of which is derived from our own basic science laboratory and seminars.

At the successful completion of this program, the candidate will be able to sit for his/her boards in Plastic Surgery.