Bohdan Pomahač

Bohdan Pomahač (; born 8 March 1971) is a Czech plastic surgeon. He led the team that performed the first full face transplant in United States and the third overall in the world. His parents were a chemical engineer and a school teacher. The family lived in a small three-room apartment, and used to spend weekends at their weekend house in Morávka, a municipality in the Moravian-Silesian Beskids mountain range.

As a teenager, Pomahač became a passionate chess player, devoting as many as 40 hours a week to his hobby. He was inspired by Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov and made it to the major chess league in the country.

In 2007 Pomahač became the head of the hospital's burn trauma centre and also head of the team specializing in facial transplants.

On 9 April 2009 Pomahač performed the second partial face transplant in the United States (and seventh in the world). During a 17-hour operation, a surgical team led by Pomahač, replaced the nose, upper lip, cheeks, and roof of the mouth - along with corresponding muscles, bones and nerves - of James Maki, age 59. Mr. Maki's face was severely injured after falling onto the electrified third rail at a Boston subway station in 2005. In May 2009, he made a public media appearance and declared he was happy with the result. This procedure was also shown in the eighth episode of the ABC documentary series Boston Med.

After that procedure was successfully completed, the Defense Department awarded a $3.4 million grant to the hospital in December 2009 to fund five face transplants, according to Col. Janet Harris, director of the Clinical and Rehabilitative Medicine Research Program for the Army Medical Research and Material Command.

Two other patients are already on the list for other operations funded by the Defense Department. They are Mitch Hunter of Indianapolis, an Army veteran who was in a car crash after his Army stint, and Charla Nash, a Connecticut woman who lost her hands, nose, lips and eyelids in 2009 when she was mauled by a chimpanzee.

Appearances Pomahač has been a keynote speaker at the Congress of Future Medical Leaders (2014, 2015, 2016).