Becker’s reported on seven orthopedic surgeons who earned honors in the first quarter of 2025.
Brian Cole, MD, of Chicago-basedMidwest Orthopaedics at Rush, earned the 2025 Orthopaedic Research and Education Foundation Clinical Research Award. He was recognized for his 25 years of work to advance osteochondral allograft transplantation for cartilage and bone defects.
Nicholas Piuzzi, MD, of Cleveland Clinic, earned the 2025 Kappa Delta Young Investigator Award for research on advanced analytics and personalized prediction tools in total hip and knee replacements.
Matthew Provencher, MD, of The Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colo., earned the 2025 Kappa Delta Ann Doner Vaughn Award for research he conducted over 25 years on anterior shoulder instability research. He and his team studied the early identification of glenohumeral pathomorphology and optimized return-to-duty strategies in military populations.
Brian Feeley, MD, earned the 2025 Kappa Delta Elizabeth Winston Lanier Award for research in advancing the understanding of muscle degeneration in rotator cuff injuries and outcomes. Over the last 15 years he and his team found the source of fatty infiltration that causes muscle atrophy, leading to poor functional outcomes in rotator cuff repairs.
Colleen Sabatini, MD, earned the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Humanitarian Award, according to a March 12 news release. She’s a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at the University of California San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland. Dr. Sabatini has also done pediatric orthopedic work abroad, with a focus on serving children in Uganda since 2013.
Thomas Sculco, MD, earned the AAOS Diversity Award. He is surgeon-in-chief emeritus at New York City-based Hospital for Special Surgery. In this decades-long career he developed and established multiple infrastructures to enhance diversity within orthopedic, address healthcare disparities and bolster patient care.
Steven Gitelis, MD, earned the William W. Tipton, Jr., MD, Leadership Award. He is a professor and director of the Rush Musculoskeletal Oncology Program in Chicago. He”s also chief medical officer of Onkos, a company focused on cancer care. Under his leadership at Rush, he created and grew one of the region’s largest sarcoma programs and formed the Rush Multispecialty Musculoskeletal tumor board.
