Carlos A. Suárez-Quian, Ph.D., is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. His teaching expertise is in clinical gross anatomy where he served as gross anatomy discipline director of the first-year medical school curriculum for over 30 years. During this time, he received numerous teaching awards, including the Golden Apple, the Geza Illes Award in Gross Anatomy, and the Kaiser-Permanente Teaching Award granted by his faculty peers. In May 2008, Dr. Suárez-Quian was an early inductee into the MAGIS Society of Master Teachers, the highest award Georgetown bestows on a faculty member at the Medical School. He is also a published textbook author, speaker, visiting faculty member, and consultant on clinical gross anatomy programs around the world. He is the author of the Online Guided Gross Anatomy Dissector (Sinauer Press, 2012), an innovative, online tutorial to teach gross anatomy to medical and allied health students. He became co-author of The Clinical Anatomy of the Cranial Nerves, by J.A. Vilensky, W.M. Robertson and C.A. Suárez-Quian (Wiley, 2015) and published the seven-book series of All-in-One Anatomy Exam Review: Image-Based Questions and Answers with his co-author, Dr. Vilensky. He is also the co-author of Functional Anatomy For Occupational Therapy (Books of Discovery Press, 2022), now used in nearly 50% of programs nationwide.
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.” He was a founding member and co-director of the Georgetown Medical Center Mini Medical School Program for over 25 years. Dr. Suárez-Quian served as one of 15 national judges for the annual Regeneron Science Competition (formerly Intel) that awards over 1.5 million in scholarships to high school seniors.
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.
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). 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: fishing to pass the time, 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 of Cuban origin, he does not enjoy cigars.
His up-to-date C.V. is available here.