Louis C. Gerstenfeld, PhD, Receives Lifetime Achievement Award

Louis C. Gerstenfeld, PhD, professor of orthopaedic surgery, has been selected as the as the 2022 recipient of the inaugural Orthopaedic Research Society (ORS) International Section of Fracture Repair (ISFR) Lifetime Achievement Award.

The award honors highly accomplished individuals who have throughout their career demonstrated and promoted the highest values of the ORS ISFR (collaboration, diversity, mentorship, innovation, scientific excellence) in their leadership, service, education and professional relationships.

According to his nominators, Gerstenfeld exemplifies the spirit of this award through his career with pioneering cross-disciplinary collaborations to accelerate scientific discovery, applying cutting edge technologies resulting in some of the first ‘omics’ data for fracture healing, continued volunteering on various committees and for his strong record of mentoring and training the next generation of bone researchers.

Gerstenfeld has studied skeletal biology for more than 35 years and has a broad knowledge across many areas in the field, including metabolic bone disease and orthopedic-related diseases. He has carried out numerous pre-clinical assessments of pharmacological compounds as they relate to safety and efficacy in the treatment of fractures and osteoporosis.

His laboratory was among the first in the U.S. to develop in-vitro osteoblast culture models and the isolation of the proteins and cDNA clones of the extracellular matrix proteins that are uniquely expressed by these cells. His laboratory participated in studies of the effects of weightlessness in bone cells on the first NASA/NIH NIAMS joint project experimentation space shuttle launches in April 1994 and February 1995. He has served on NIH, NASA and Department of Defense review panels for orthopedic-related research and worked on Special Emphasis Review Panels for the FDA.

His current work focuses on relating genome variants that define human bone quality to transcriptomic phenotypes of bone tissues and bone cells. Recent studies have defined the temporal patterns of the transcriptome of fracture callus tissues across healing in animal models as well as carrying out a large-scale proteomic assessment of the serum across fracture healing in these models. His current studies are focused on the translation of these pre-clinical studies into humans through a DOD funded research project with Major Extremity Trauma and Rehabilitation Consortium to assess the human serum proteome in order to develop serum based diagnostics to follow the progression of fracture healing and define delayed and failed healing in humans.

For more than 65 years, ORS has been the leading international research society dedicated to accelerating musculoskeletal discovery to improve health. The ORS community is multi-disciplinary and is comprised of members from academia, industry/private sector, government, and private practice at all career levels from around the world.