Freddie Fu

Career and accomplishments

Fu is an active member, holding many offices in numerous academic organizations including the Herodicus Society, American Orthopaedic Association, and Orthopaedic Research and Education Foundation (OREF). In 2008 & Mrs. Fu made a $1 million commitment to OREF to fund a new research award. This award will support research directed by a female orthopaedic surgeon researcher on a topic related to sports medicine or by an orthopaedic surgeon researcher of either gender on a topic of special interest to female athletes. Fu was president of the Pennsylvania Orthopaedic Society and, in 2008, assumed the presidency of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM) and was the first foreign-born president in AOSSM’s 40-year history. In 2009, he was named President of the International Society of Arthroscopy, Knee Surgery and Orthopaedic Sports Medicine, the “United Nations of Sports Medicine” with a membership of 4,000 doctors from 96 countries. In 2011 he received the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons’ (AAOS) Diversity Award, which recognizes members of the Academy who have distinguished themselves through their outstanding commitment to making the field of orthopaedic surgery more representative of and accessible to diverse patient populations. Fu is the ninth recipient of the Diversity Award and first Asian American. In 2012, Fu received the Sports Leadership Award from Dapper Dan Charities, which was subsequently re-named the Freddie Fu Sports Leadership Award and will remain in perpetuity.

Pitt Orthopaedic Research

His team currently has more than 100 studies completed or underway to evaluate the merits of the anatomic approach by viewing the knee as an organ. He also has ongoing collaborations with K. Christopher Beard, Ph.D., a vertebrate paleontologist, and other curators at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and veterinarians at the Pittsburgh Zoo. Additionally Fu is working closely with C. Owen Lovejoy, Ph.D., an anthropologist at Kent State University, who reconstructed the skeleton of “Lucy”, the nearly complete fossil of a human ancestor that walked upright more than three million years ago. Such collaborations allow for detailed study of evolution and bony and soft tissue anatomy of the knee.

ACL reconstruction surgery

In 1987 Fu was awarded a Whitaker Foundation Grant for “Glenohumeral Stability: A Dynamic Model”. This led to further joint kinematics studies and to his current collaborations on ACL surgery with Scott Tashman in the Pitt Biodynamics Lab. Fu has performed over 6,000 ACL surgeries since 1982 and is a world leader in anatomic reconstruction of the ACL.