Freddie Fu

Freddie H. Fu was a Hong Kong-born American orthopaedic surgeon and academic, who lived from 1950 to 2021. He was the David Silver Professor and chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and in 2010 was appointed the university's eighth distinguished service professor. He studied at Dartmouth College and became prominent in sports medicine: in 2008 he became president of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine, the first foreign-born president in its forty-year history, and in 2009 he was named president of the International Society of Arthroscopy, Knee Surgery and Orthopaedic Sports Medicine. His research group at Pittsburgh pursued the anatomic approach to reconstruction of the knee, treating the knee as an organ, and carried out more than one hundred studies, including collaborations with paleontologists and an anthropologist who reconstructed the fossil skeleton known as Lucy. He received the Diversity Award of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons in 2011 and died of metastatic melanoma on 24 September 2021.