Emily Clarke-Pearson is a native of North Carolina. After attending the University of North Carolina and graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in Fine Arts, Emily began her career as an artist and teacher in East Los Angeles, teaching middle school with the Teach For America organization. Inspired by her mother, a former teacher who then became a pediatrician, and her father, a GYN-oncologist, she decided to return to school to pursue a medical career.

Emily became Dr. Clarke-Pearson after graduating from medical school at Brown University in 2007. She then completed a residency in general surgery at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. Here, while assisting in breast cancer reconstruction surgery, she saw women transformed from cancer patients into empowered survivors. Inspired, Dr. Clarke Pearson decided to become a plastic surgeon.

Emily Clarke-Pearson entered Harvard Medical School’s plastic surgery residency as one of three women in a group of 27. As a woman in a predominantly male environment, she made the most of any opportunity to motivate female medical students and residents to pursue a career in plastic surgery – a field where the vast majority of patients are women, but the vast majority of surgeons are still men. After Harvard, Dr. Clarke-Pearson spent a year in fellowship training at Johns Hopkins, learning how to perform surgery at the microscopic scale to get the best aesthetic results after advanced cancer and trauma surgery.

Coming full circle, Dr. Clarke-Pearson now practices primarily aesthetic plastic surgery. She specializes in face, breast and body cosmetic procedures, as well as in non-surgical techniques like Botox and facial filler injection. Her background in fine arts gives her a good eye for restoring natural beauty and making her patients look fresh but not “fake”. She listens closely to her patients’ concerns, and translates that into the surgery or procedure that best fits each patient’s goals.