APB Speaker Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosa Appointed Dean of Research at Mayo Clinic in Florida
03 Nov 2022
APB speaker and famed Mayo Clinic Neurosurgeon Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa has been named Dean of Research at Mayo Clinic in Florida. Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosa succeeds Tushar Patel, M.B., Ch.B., who has held the position since 2014 at the Jacksonville institution.
Quiñones-Hinojosa is widely regarded as one of the world's finest surgeons and scientists, operating on some 250 brain tumors every year and leading cutting-edge federally funded research to cure brain cancer. He will remain the chair of the Department of Neurologic Surgery. He is also the founder of Mission: Brain, a non-profit organization that provides neurosurgical expertise and resources to patients, caregivers and healthcare providers in underserved areas throughout the world.
He has received multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health to find a cure for brain cancer, holds over a dozen patents and has started several companies to bring his research findings from bench to the bedside. Last year, he was recognized as the Mayo Clinic in Florida Investigator of the Year.
Quiñones-Hinojosa grew up in a small village near Mexicali, Mexico. After permanently moving to the United States at 19, he toiled by day as an undocumented migrant worker in the tomato fields and rail yards of Central California. On his days off, he attended biology classes at the San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton. Then he became a gifted student at the University of California Berkeley before transferring to Harvard, where he received his medical degree and became a naturalized U.S. citizen, all before the age of 30.
After completing his residency at the University of California, San Francisco—where he also obtained a postdoctoral fellowship in developmental and stem cell biology and was funded by the National Institute of Health for his pioneering work—Quiñones-Hinojosa became a Professor of Neurosurgery and Oncology, Neuroscience and Cellular and Molecular Medicine at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In less than six years after starting there as a faculty member—a meteoric rise in academia.