John Barker

Dr. John Barker has given presentations on face transplants that begin with images of a young girl whose entire face had been torn off in a farming accident. With these disturbing images Barker shows the audience “why” he is passionate about developing better treatments for patients suffering with facial disfigurement. He also explains “how” his team’s research leads to the first human face transplants.

At PINC.Sarasota Dr. Barker will discuss his new research that focuses on the same patients, but instead of transplanting faces from donors, is attempting to harness the body’s inherent regenerative capabilities to regrow the patients’ own face. If successful, this new approach will give patients, crippled with facial disfigurement, a new face, and with it, the gift of living a normal life.

John Barker is a native of Santa Barbara, California, where he attended high school and began his undergraduate studies at the University of California. He then moved to his mother's home country of Argentina where he studied medicine and earned his medical degree at the National University of Cordoba. Then Dr. Barker moved to Heidelberg, Germany where at the University he did surgical research and earned his Doctor of Medicine degree. After completing his graduate and postgraduate studies in Argentina and Germany, Dr. Barker returned to the US where, between 1989 and 2010, he established and built the Plastic Surgery Research Laboratories at the University of Louisville. In 2010, Dr. Barker moved his family to Frankfurt, Germany where, at the JW Goethe University, he established the Frankfurt Initiative for Regenerative Medicine (FIRM).