Trio Honored for Leadership, Diversity, Humanitarian Efforts

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons honored three of its members last week for helping improve patients’ lives and advancing their profession.

During a ceremonial meeting on the third day of this year’s annual gathering in Chicago, Ill., AAOS President John R. Tongue presented awards to Michael J. Yaszemski, M.D., David S. Hungerford, M.D., and Mark H. Gonzalez, M.D., MEng.

Yaszemski received the William J. Tipton Jr. MD Leadership Award. A member of both the spine surgery and musculoskeletal oncology divisions at the Mayo Clinic, Yaszemski directs the facility’s Polymeric Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering laboratory. He has chaired the AAOS Orthopaedic Device Forum since 2006 and also is the military advisor to the president of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

A brief video tribute to Yaszemski (aired before the award presentation) included accolades from various colleagues who referred to him as a “servant leader” and remarkable, dedicated physician. “Mike is nearly unflappable now,” one coworker said in the video. “Any time you have last rights given to you, any other problem you encounter doesn’t seem so bad.”

Yaszemski, a U.S. Air Force Reserve Brigadier General who has been deployed five times during his 33-year military career, shared his secret to successful leadership with a standing-room only crowd in the Grand Ballroom of McCormick Place: “Leadership from my perspective starts with followership. It’s been my experience as a follow that has helped guide me in what should be done in a leadership position.”

Upon accepting the Tipton award on March 21, Yaszemski requested a moment of silence to remember U.S. military personnel who have been fighting two wars over the last decade. He also challenged the audience to continue providing excellent orthopedic care to patients and advocate for the profession. “Spread the message. When you get the opportunity, tell people what orthopedic surgeons do,” he concluded.

The Tipton Leadership Award recognizes academy members who demonstrate outstanding leadership qualities that benefit the orthopedic community, patients, and/or the American public.

Hungerford received the AAOS Humanitarian Award for helping the medically needy and underprivileged both domestically and internationally. He has trained orthopedic surgeons in Ethiopia, Kenya, Ghana, Liberia and Zambia on behalf of CURE International and related organizations, and he serves on the boards of several nonprofit groups to help provide medical equipment and training programs to disaster areas and mission hospitals in developing countries. Hungerford has helped create more than 10 hospitals in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean.

“I’ve taken people who are wheelchair-bound and done an operation and now, they can do anything they want,” Hungerford said. “That’s a fantastic thing to do. That’s what makes orthopedics so much fun.”

Though he retired in 2011 from Johns Hopkins Orthopaedic Surgery and The Good Samaritan Hospital in Baltimore, Md. (a mere 12 miles from his home in Cockeysville), Hungerford still performs surgery in mission hospitals and trains healthcare professionals in less fortunate countries. His family’s Tree of Life Foundation has provided more than 1,500 grants to the world’s most impoverished communities to fund healthcare-related capital resource projects (such as digging wells to provide clean water sources).

“Doing something is better than doing nothing,” Hungerford said after accepting the award. “And doing something will lead to something else. As a child I was raised to believe that caring for the unfortunate was just a part of everyday life. It really is more blessed to give than to receive.”

Gonzalez dedicated his AAOS Diversity Award to the scores of residents with whom he’s worked throughout his career. “In many ways, they’ve taught me more than I’ve taught them,” he told fellow academy members.

Gonzalez is a professor and Orthopaedics Department chairman at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Under his guidance, the school accepted its first female African-American orthopedic resident and first female orthopedic faculty advisor. He previously was chairman of Orthopedics and Chief of Hand Surgery at Cook County Hospital for more than 20 years.

“When I started practicing at Cook County Hospital, the makeup of our doctors did not reflect the population of our patients. For residencies, we have always tried to recruit the best and brightest from all backgrounds. Talent can easily go unrecognized. As educators we must encourage and nurture talent from all backgrounds because our similarities outweigh our differences,” he noted.