Dr. Steven R. Cohen: From Craniofacial Surgeon to Aesthetics

Most aesthetic surgeons arrive at the face from cosmetic training. Dr. Steven R. Cohen came from the other direction. For more than three decades he has operated on children born with craniofacial conditions, where a surgeon rebuilds bone and soft tissue that did not form as it should. The cosmetic practice came later, and it carries the habits of that earlier work.

An unusual training path

Cohen’s route through medicine took in more specialties than most surgeons see. He trained in general surgery at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York and Dartmouth, completed a two-year cardiac surgery fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, then moved to plastic surgery at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He finished with a craniofacial and facial plastic surgery fellowship under Dr. Henry Kawamoto at UCLA.

His first leadership role came in 1990, directing the craniofacial program at the University of Michigan. In 1993 he moved to Atlanta as co-director of the Center for Craniofacial Disorders at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

San Diego, 1999

In 1999 Cohen took two jobs in San Diego at once. He became chief of craniofacial surgery and surgical director of the craniofacial center at Children’s Hospital of San Diego, and he founded FACES+, the private practice that now focuses on facial rejuvenation. He still directs the craniofacial fellowship at Rady Children’s Hospital and UC San Diego, where he holds a clinical professorship.

Running both has shaped how he approaches cosmetic work. A surgeon who reconstructs a child’s jaw thinks in terms of structure first. When Cohen looks at an aging face, he looks for what has receded and descended underneath before he considers the skin.

The inventor

Cohen has spent much of his career building tools that did not exist. His FACES+ biography credits him as inventor of the MID system, distributed by Stryker, which the practice describes as the first commercially distributed internal distraction system. Distraction devices let surgeons lengthen bone a little at a time, and Cohen’s biography records him as the first surgeon to treat newborns with Pierre Robin sequence using distraction, an approach that can avoid a tracheostomy.

He holds a patent on a biodegradable distraction device developed with Macropore. In aesthetics, he co-invented an outpatient Biofilling kit with Tulip Medical and a closed-system liposuction and automatic fat grafting device with Millenium Medical Technologies. He also co-created Lipocube, a device that processes fat to concentrate regenerative cells for facial rejuvenation.

Building a regenerative practice

Those inventions fed into FACES+. The practice’s signature facial work combines deep-plane lifting with a fat grafting method Cohen developed, filtering fat into grades for different facial layers. FACES+ reports that the protocol retains about 80 percent of added volume at two years in patients under 55.

Cohen has pushed further into regenerative aesthetics with exosome-based treatments and co-developed Morphiya, an exosome skincare line. He serves as section editor for fat grafting and stem cells at the Aesthetic Surgery Journal.

Teaching the next generation

In 2009 Cohen established the UCSD and San Diego Multidisciplinary Aesthetic Fellowship, which FACES+ describes as the first US program to combine training in dermatology, plastic surgery, facial plastic surgery and oculoplastic surgery. Plastic surgery residents have twice named him teacher of the year, in 2001 and 2011. The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery has given him its Tiffany Award.

Recognition

Castle Connolly has listed Cohen among its Top Doctors since 2002. Newsweek has included him on its America’s Best Plastic Surgeons list each year since 2023, and its 2025 ranking placed him first in Southern California for facelift surgery.

The painter

Cohen also paints, and his work hangs in private collections across the United States. The connection to his surgery is easy to draw: both ask you to look at proportion, light and what a face communicates before you change anything.

For a surgeon who began his career rebuilding faces that needed it, the cosmetic practice follows the same rule. Understand the structure, respect the person, and change only what serves them.