A
u t u m n
2 019
Dr. Joan Greco ’76 builds a life and practice focused on empowerment and giving back to others the advice of both her father and her brother, Richard, who is a nationallyrenowned plastic surgeon, decided life as a dentist would be better for a woman. Dr. Greco completed her undergraduate prerequisites at Texas A&M University and then attended dental school at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. After being there six weeks, she knew she made “a wrong decision but was going to finish what she committed to.” By her second year, she found oral surgery and everything changed. She spent all of her spare time in the department. By the time she finished dental school she had published 11 papers in their referred journals and had given as many presentations at the national and international levels. To circle around - she worked in the neonatal and pediatric intensive care units as a nurse on weekends (she was able to challenge the nursing boards in Texas and passed without finishing school).
Dr. Joan Greco ’76 has made it her mission to lead a life of personal growth, contribution, and giving back to others. In the 43 years since graduating from MMI, she has used her passion for oral surgery to become one of 422 females practicing oral surgery in a field of 6,374 surgeons where the average career span of a female surgeon is 15.3 years. Over the past 26 years, she has developed a thriving practice on the Big Island of Hawaii that is ranked among the top .2 percent in the country.
Dr. Greco’s sense of determination not only fueled her journey to become an oral surgeon but also played a defining role in her desire to empower young women to pursue careers in medicine and dentistry. Her father Dr. Victor Greco was a prominent general surgeon in Hazleton and was on the first team that invented and used the Dr. Joan Greco '76 is an oral and maxillofacial surgeon who Heart/Lung machine, allowing for owns and operates her own practice in Hawaii. She said it was not easy going safe surgery on the heart and its through dental school knowing she vessels. As a young girl, she spent didn’t want to do general dentistry. “I’m a surgeon at heart. I see a time watching him perform surgery from an observation deck at St. problem, I think about how I can fix it, and then I fix it,” Dr. Greco Joseph’s Hospital in Hazleton. Her dad was the icon, but her mom said. “My initial desire was to perform cleft palate and craniofacial gave her the tools to become all of who she is today. surgeries. When I worked as a neonatal nurse, I saw that there were In spite of her early interest in becoming a doctor, her parents plenty of patients who had structural problems and decided that advised her to become a nurse and marry a doctor - but she did not want to marry a doctor - she wanted to be a doctor. On their urging, was the avenue I wanted to take. It’s really exciting when you can take something mildly unattractive and make it attractive,” she said. she entered Jefferson’s School of Diploma Nursing, but knowing It was in her second year that Dr. Greco decided that she wanted this was not enough, she also attended Wharton Evening School to specialize in treating children with facial deformities through and eventually transitioned into The Wharton School of Finance. dentistry as an Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon (OMFS). Although From Wharton, she graduated with a triple major in marketing, management, and finance. On graduation from Wharton, she took a oral surgery education programs classically take the top one or two percent in the class (which she was not), being a woman also made position in a mortgage banking company in San Antonio, Texas, but it statistically even more difficult to match. She was ultimately quickly realized that “dog-eat-dog and pull someone else down to accepted by Emory University’s OMFS program as a research fellow get ahead,” was not for her. “I am a people-lover, so after discussion and intern. She later matched there as a resident. In good fortune, with my parents, I went back to school to become a doctor.” the Emory Dental School closed and she was accepted and made She was accepted to both medical and dental schools but on the move into the country’s #2 ranked program at Louisiana State (continued on page 11)
T
h e
N
e w s l e tt e r
o f
MMI
P
r e p a r a t o r y
S
c h o o l