Carlos A. Suárez-Quian, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. He is also a published textbook author, speaker, visiting faculty member, and consultant on clinical gross anatomy programs around the world. Before his shift in career focus, Dr. Suárez was a funded research scientist with a concentration in cell and molecular biology, during which time he published more than 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including for a technique he pioneered called “laser capture microdissection.”
A native of La Habana, Cuba, Dr. Suárez came to the United States as a political refugee when he was seven years old. He is the son of Andrés Suárez and Hortensia Quian. He grew up in Miami and Gainesville, Florida, earned his B.S. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, did his graduate work at the Harvard University Medical School, and his post-doctorate work at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development after being awarded an independent fellowship.
Dr. Suárez began as an Assistant Professor at Georgetown in 1987, was awarded tenure in 1993, and conducted a sabbatical under Chief Research Scientist Dr. Robert Bonner at the National Institute of Health in 1998.
In 2008, he was an early inductee into the Magis Society, the highest honor at Georgetown Medical School. He is a previous winner and regular nominee of the Golden Apple and Geza M. Illes awards for teaching.
Teaching Philosophy
Drawing on nearly forty years of teaching experience, Dr. Suárez is a firm believer that “the map is not the terrain,” and that anatomy education is optimally based on real-world dissection in lab and supplemented with high-resolution digital imagery (contrary to legacy practices of artistic renderings, and current trends toward low-fidelity virtual substitutes). In 2011, he published the first-of-its-kind Online Guided Anatomy Dissector (Oxford University Press), and in 2014 was an early adopter of the Apple iBooks platform, with a particular focus on gamifying anatomy education and review.
Dr. Suárez is also a passionate advocate for cura personalis (Latin: “care for the whole person”), a Jesuit teaching and one of the central tenets of the Georgetown University approach to education.
Dr. Suárez maintains membership in the American Association of Clinical Anatomy, and was previously a member of the American Society of Andrology, the Society for the Study of Reproduction, Sigma Xi, and the American Society of Anatomy.
Dr. Suárez’s hobbies and interests include: mentoring junior faculty and students, exchange programs with science communities in Spain, Central, and South America, and forceful debates on the relative merits of various cocktail recipes. Despite being Cuban, he does not enjoy cigars.