About Ivona Percec, MD
I always had very strong female role models, so it never occurred to me that I couldn’t do it. I’m always excited by a challenge, and I just keep going. Not that it’s easy, but if you stop to think about it too much, you’ll scare yourself off. Her love of science, art, and working with her hands naturally dovetailed into a career in plastic surgery, sculpting people’s faces and bodies. As a high school senior in Ohio, her first exposure to the field was during a six-week internship with the head of plastic surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. She went on to Princeton University the next year, and during her spring break returned to the Cleveland Clinic. She then enrolled in an MD/PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. As she rotated through various medical specialties, she says she stayed open to the possibilities of each, but that going to plastic surgery “was like coming home. For me, it wasn’t necessarily that I was going to go into medicine. I was directly focused on plastic surgery from early on.
