Gregory Borschel, MD

Dr. Borschel is the Chief of Plastic Surgery at Riley Hospital for Children. His practice focuses on pediatric nerve injuries, corneal neurotization, facial paralysis, congenital hand surgery, and microvascular reconstruction. His research laboratory develops treatments for nerve injuries and improving patient outcomes. He works with neuroscientists, engineers, and doctors around the world to improve treatments for patients with these conditions. Dr. Borschel graduated from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1997 and completed a residency in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the University of Michigan in 2005. He completed a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship in neuromuscular tissue engineering at the University of Michigan, and a fellowship in Pediatric Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada. His clinical work focuses on pediatric facial paralysis, nerve injuries, hand surgery and microvascular reconstruction, and he has pioneered corneal neurotization, a treatment for neurotrophic keratopathy, a rare cause of blindness caused by lack of nerve supply to the cornea. His research laboratory focuses on ways to enhance peripheral nerve regeneration, including drug and growth factor delivery, electrical stimulation, and the cellular and molecular mechanisms underpinning neurotrophic keratopathy and corneal neurotization.

He has published over 130 original peer-reviewed publications, four textbooks in Plastic Surgery, and dozens of book chapters. He has served as primary supervisor for several Master’s students, PhD students and postdoctoral fellows in nerve regeneration research. These students have won hundreds of international, national and local awards, fellowships, competitions and prizes for their research in nerve regeneration.

Dr. Borschel was elected President of the American Society for Peripheral Nerve for 2021 and was reappointed President for 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

He was elected Chair of the Plastic Surgery Research Council for 2020 and was appointed Chair for an unprecedented second term for 2022.

His research sponsors have included granting agencies such as the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Moebius Syndrome Foundation, and the Foundation for Fighting Blindness. In 2007 he was the recipient of the American Association of Plastic Surgeons Academic Scholar Award. He was also awarded the C. James Carrico Faculty Research Award by the American College of Surgeons in 2009. In 2014 he was awarded the University of Toronto Department of Surgery George Armstrong Peters Prize “for outstanding academic productivity in research, the highest honour that the Department can bestow upon a young surgeon.”

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