Please welcome to the stage, Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Foundation President, Dr. Eric Blumen. Everybody, we're running a little late and we're going to try and catch up, but we got to give people the time that they deserve. I want to thank Carol and Bruce for giving us the time to properly recognize all the people that we need to. So, as you know, the foundation raises funds for education, research, and humanitarian efforts. This provides the economic engine for your AOFAS. Funds are raised through multiple efforts, a few of which you're going to hear about today. The foundation has a separate governing board from the AOFAS and the funds raised are separate from those of the AOFAS. Your board members are listed here. I am not going to go through them all. You know many of them, if not all of them. If you see them this week, please thank them in person. They work extremely hard for you and over the past year have done immense amounts of work in making our financial goals realized. I'm not going to, as I said, not going to go individually through them, but I do want to specifically thank Dr. Bruce Cohen and Dr. Jeremy McCormick as they are moving off of the board this year, and I want to recognize our incoming board member, Dr. Joe Park. I also want to thank Dr. Scott Ellis, who performed Herculean efforts last year, not only as the foundation board, but also serving as the AOFAS annual meeting program chair with our wonderful virtual program. I also want to just take a second and thank all of our AOFAS staffers, and specifically want to call out both Kathy Powers and Elaine Layton for all their work and ongoing dedication. They are tireless working for you. Lastly, I want to thank you. This is not possible without you and without your generosity. Your generosity and your donations have a huge impact on our society and all of our missions. Education, we have 81 residents and 55 fellow scholarships, webinars, and educational programs at the annual meeting. This year alone, there's nearly $150,000 in research grants that have been awarded. That's phenomenal. And humanitarian service, although we did not have humanitarian trips in 2021, we plan to resume these to Vietnam and Kenya in 2022. I want to move on and talk about the pillars of our society. These honor those iconic leaders who have paved the way for growth and excellence in patient care. As you've seen from our banners out front today, our previous pillars are William Hamilton, John Gould, and Sig Hansen. And this year, it's my very large pleasure to introduce the next pillar of our society, which is the to announce that this year's, or rather the 2020 pillar, is Jim Brodsky. And here to talk about this is Charlie Saltzman. Is this on? I can't tell. Is it working? Yeah, good. Okay. I'll try to be brief, even though I really don't want to be. It's a great honor, perhaps the greatest of all, to give a short tribute and announce the completion of the initial fundraising phase for the James W. Brodsky pillar, supporting the Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Foundation. Thank you to all those who have given to create the pillar. Today, we take a moment in time to stop. And here's the first slide. To stop and publicly celebrate the contributions of Dr. Jim Brodsky to all of our lives, our patients' lives, and our field. When Jim first asked me to introduce him, I was humbled and a bit flummoxed. Although we are friends, he has trained 90 fellows, 90 fellows, and has many long-term partners who know him well. And I know each one of them remains important to him. Then I realized how astute Jim really is. I'm an outsider. I may not know some things. So I desperately needed to talk to somebody who has been in the clinical setting with Jim, who has known him for a long time, and has insider knowledge. And I wanted to find someone who lives so far away he could speak frankly, truth to power, with no potential adverse consequences from Jim. So I found John Green from Sydney, Australia, 10,000 miles away. He answered my call, and here is what he had to say. Thirty years ago, I attended a board's review course in Dallas. I rather liked Dallas, Lord knows what I was thinking, and asked around if anyone in Dallas would be a good person to do a foot fellowship with. They mentioned the name of Jim Brodsky. I saw every condition in foot surgery in my first six weeks with him. Although he first made his name writing about the diabetic foot and classifying Charcot arthropathy, he is certainly an authority on every area in foot surgery. At the end of my fellowship, he even offered me a position in Dallas, telling me that I could see all of the heel pain in his practice. He has trained many fellows, both from the United States and internationally. Many of his fellows have gone on to become leaders in their own country. He is a little man with a very big heart. He has an incredible generosity of spirit. He has always been very passionate about teaching and very passionate about research. Jim is a justifiably a member of this society for his unceasing contribution to education, research, leadership, and philanthropy. In Australia, he would be called a national living treasure. National living treasure, I agree. Transformative leader who, as president, catapulted AOFES forward by changing our entire administration and moved us from Seattle to Chicago, where we've been very successful. Changed our trajectory as a society. What I've learned further as I've gotten to know him is he's a polyglot, master gardener, fine woodworker, a potter, a cook, art historian, voracious reader, and perhaps what would distinguish him the most is he has an insatiable curiosity. He is wise. He has sound advice for his fellows. I would like to share with you Brodskyisms. Here are a few. God makes you normal and surges make you different and sometimes better. A wise man can learn from everyone and my favorite, kids. The gift that keeps on taking. Jim likes giving and it is apparent in everything, including the love in his beautiful family and now with the latest addition, little Ruth, to his family. Jim is rightfully respected as a foundational pillar of our society's future, but what kind of pillar is he? So I went to the BOD. This is a famous library in Oxford, perhaps the greatest library in the world, but when I tried to enter, I was summarily refused entrance. And as I stood outside the storied edifice of the BOD filled with words, words, words, and realized that any true orthopedic surgeon does not really need words. I saw this. I saw that there's a number of different columns, the Doric column, the Ionic column, and the Corinthian columns. I was trying to decide which kind is Jim. Is he a Doric column, like Roger Mann maybe was, founded in basic structure and function? The argument for Doric is clear. Jim's gait analysis work, and this is just from FAI, has quantified what to expect and not to expect after foot and ankle surgery. So maybe that's what he is. Or is an Ionic column building three-dimensional non-linear structures like our surgically gifted Ted Hanson? And this is, for those who don't know, this implant Jim designed and then showed us how to use it, proceeds of which have funded his gait lab. And these are a number of the important publications he's done just for realignment surgeries. Or is he a Corinthian, ornate, cultured, but delicate as taught to us by the pillar Bill Hamilton with ballet and John Gould with microvascular surgery? The argument for Corinthian is compelling. Jim has done incredible soft tissue work, and unbeknownst to him, his paper on these nuanced problems is the most downloaded paper in 2021. So our newly named pillar sits besides other society pillars who have come before him with a unique set of major contributions that defy the ancient Greeks, Greek classification system for pillars, with his combined approaches to improve our field. And so he is a Doric Ionic Corinthian pillar, a very special type of pillar. And now I have the very great privilege to introduce a true multi-dimensional pillar and style work pioneer of our special word, Dr. Jim Brodsky, a person I admire, and I think we all want to sit by. And I'd like to call him up if he could to say a few words. Thank you. Well, thank you, Charlie. And thank you to the foundation of the AOFES for this great honor. Charlie, I never realized how prone you was to exaggeration. I hope I'm worthy, but I guess it's too late. You know, I'm very excited to be a pillar. It addresses a long-standing, really sort of a short-standing issue I've had, you know, and I'd hoped that it would give me a certain kind of stature that would allow me to look over the lectern finally. And it's been successful. This one is just perfect. I'm also very pleased to be receiving this post-humorously and not post-humorously. It's very, I'm very honored, and it's special to me because it comes from this remarkable society that I dearly love, with people I dearly respect and love, dedicated clinicians, brilliant researchers, inspiring teachers, talented surgeons, and many, many dear friends. We have all had honor by being here because we have thoughtful, hardworking colleagues. We do world-class collaboration and friendly competition to advance our serious goals, and we have fun doing them. We like each other. The real honor is the honor we all have here of having a part in this society. We have a culture that there's room here for strong but respectful differences of opinion. We welcome a stunning diversity of talents and interests among our membership, and we operate with a collegiality and good humor that makes us the envy of every other subspecialty society. I am so proud of this astonishing set of accomplishments of the society over the course of its history and of my 35 years of involvement. It's grown enormously. It's truly international. It's a major engine of research and clinical advancement in our field. It has huge educational impact on trainees and graduate surgeons and the world in general. We've grown two journals that are outstanding. We engage in research and service. We've established and grown a foundation. The list goes on and on. I'm grateful to all of my friends, my teachers, who are colleagues both older and younger. I'm grateful to our dedicated staff. I'm especially grateful to my partners in Dallas, Chris, Babu, Jacob, and David. I'm very, very grateful to the fellows who over the last 30 years have taught me far more than you realize, and I want to thank everyone who generously contributed to the AOFS Foundation in my honor. There's one doctor who I admire more and from whom I've learned more than any other, and I have a slide of this doctor. She's a brilliant diagnostician. She's beyond generous in service to others. She's wise in counsel, tenacious in her demand for excellence, and more than anybody else, I want to thank Dr. Cynthia Schneidler, my wife of 45 years. As Charlie said, about 2,200 years ago, when asked who is wise, the Sages of the Talmud said, a person who learns from everyone. We teach and inspire here in AOFS. We are taught and inspired by our mentors, our peers, our students. It has really been my honor and my ineffable joy to contribute for the last 35 years. Thank you. I'm going to give a short talk on the Roger and Joan Mann Family Fund. Scott Ellis came to me two years ago and asked about getting Roger to be one of the pillars. At the time, he declined, and so we decided to find a different way to honor him as the Roger and Joan Mann Family Fund. We did it at the time because it was Roger and Joan who were working in 1976 when he became secretary. He was the secretary of the board at that time, and Roger and Joan did a lot of work for the Foot and Ankle Society. The goal was to raise $150,000. We endowed it in order to endow the Roger Mann Clinical Award for the best paper at the annual meeting. It also supports some future educational projects, and it was just fully funded this past month. It is now fully funded. Over 100 individuals contributed to that. I was a Mann Fellow in 1981. Roger has been a friend and mentor for 40 years. I'm a part of AOFS because of Roger. As a past president, I'm devoted to its ongoing success. That was my disclosure. Roger was the board secretary from 1976 to 1981, I think the longest to serve in that capacity, but I want to let you know that the true secretary was this lady, along with some of her minions, Wendy, Brenda, and Jeff, who were the children who were also licking stamps and envelopes during that time period when we didn't have as much technology to help us. There's some controversy about when Roger's fellowship began. Don Baxter says it was 1974 when he showed up on doorstep in an unpaid position and spent four months with Roger as his fellow, along with working with Dr. DeVries at the time. Don just told me that one of the things he did was put in the sprinklers in Roger's yard at the new house they were building. That was how he paid for his fellowship, I guess. Mike Coughlin says that the actual fellowship, the six-month fellowship that Roger always did, began in 1978 when he was the first fellow. This is Michael, who was our president of the Society in 1991 and one of the IFAS presidents, along with Dr. Takakura. Roger was actually president of AOFAS in 1982 to 1983 and a board member from 1975 to 1983. Thirteen years, the longest service, I think, of anyone on the board. He trained five past presidents of the Foot and Ankle Society. Those fellows have trained five additional past presidents, and then those fellows trained two additional for a total of 12 who have followed Roger as presidents of the Foot and Ankle Society. Over that time, during the past 46 years since Roger first went on the board, there's only been one year where there hasn't been a Mann fellow or Dr. Mann on the board. He taught foot and ankle all over the world with Ken Johnson and others. He edited the fifth edition of DeVries' Surgery of the Foot himself, co-edited three editions with Mike Coughlin, Surgery of the Foot and Ankle, and now it's Mann's Surgery of the Foot and Ankle, about to become the 10th edition. He brought the star ankle from the Netherlands to the United States and got it approved by the FDA. He has a large sampling of published work that have been significant in furthering our abilities in foot and ankle. He was very social and loved art, had many, many friends. This is 1981 when I was his fellow, and he was often on the phone talking to other board members at the time, since he was the vice president at that time. He also knew how to have a lot of fun. Thank you. I'm going to move forward to the Humanitarian Award. And this honor is for our members or a member who had an outsized impact in humanitarian care in foot and ankle surgery and non-clinical care. This is the inaugural edition of this award, and I'm very honored to announce or to bring up Dr. Pierce Scranton, who's really the AOFAS founding father of our humanitarian efforts. Thank you. We intervened last year and COVID shut us down when we would have given this award, but here we are. And this is curious because it's not my slide, but I'll keep going. Anyway, 21 years ago when I announced the formation of the foundation and the overseas, I got tackled outside a restroom by this redheaded gal that I'd never seen before who said, I'm going. And I didn't know her from Adam, but basically she hounded me all the way to the selection process. And I eventually found out who this person was. Over the 19 years that we went to Vietnam together, at least that she went and I went 14 of them, I found her to be a brilliant, dedicated surgeon. She knew her limitations, and she knew what she was good at, and she taught and learned at the same time. She was a teacher, and although she did not speak Vietnamese, she was a great communicator and still is. She was never too proud to learn something, primitive conditions. Sometimes we'd operate in an operating room that had a hot plate with boiling water on the floor, but yet Naomi was never too proud or an instrument thrower. Somebody would have a tantrum because of conditions. She always made the best of what was available. Some of us specialized in joint replacement, some in trauma, some in arthroscopy, but Naomi specialized in humanitarian service. Fifteen years straight, she went to Vietnam, sometimes twice a year. Several trips to Managua, trips to Haiti, trips to Costa Rica. And when that wasn't enough, she decided to work with a foundation, and they're building schools for the disadvantaged in third world countries. She lives humanitarian aid. This year, fate intervened also, and Naomi would be here, but her father just passed away, so I would like you to join me in honoring Naomi Shields. Oh, my God, you're here. Wow, what a treat. Thank you so much. I didn't know you made it. Okay, we're going to move ahead here and finish up. We've got a couple more things to do before we let you guys go. This year, we're blessed because we have a record number of vendors in our exhibit hall, and some of these are listed here. They've helped with research, education, women's leadership, scholarships, and humanitarian outreach. Please take some time to go down and visit their booths and thank them. I want to take a moment to give a very special thanks to Stryker, who is our Diamond Mission Partner for 2021. We're honored to have Patrick Fisher, the Vice President and General Manager of Foot and Ankle, and I'm really honored to present him with our Diamond Mission Partner Sponsor Award. Patrick? Thank you so much, Dr. Blumen. Thank you to the Society, the Foundation, we really appreciate this. We're honored to provide this meaningful support. Thank you for giving me a couple of minutes. A couple of years ago, when Dr. Cohen, Dr. Lee, and I sat down here at this meeting to map out the fellowship scholarship, we really had no idea if we'd ever see the light of day. Thankfully, we're here today to tell you we've supported 167 fellows from 48 programs. It's just really been great to see all that, as you all, like us, see the fellows as the future. I want to thank my team, Michael Rankin, Carolyn Foster, Kim Cantana, for putting all this together, making these grants happen. It's not an easy feat at a company as large as ours. I just tell you, it's so important to be here live, we appreciate everybody being here. This is where we map out our support for resident scholars, the fellowship program, medical education, all that. We're most excited about the DE&I initiative that we're working on with AOFAS right now. Our CEO, Kevin Lobo, is actually here today, I'd love for you to come by the booth and meet him. He's an incredible leader. He and Dr. Bailey and Dr. Stewart had dinner a few, back in the spring, and really mapped out some support that we can give for the DE&I initiative here at AOFAS, and I'm glad to see that Dr. Stewart's going to be leading that effort, and we're here to help. Last 10 months, we brought the two biggest foot and ankle teams together, it's been a crazy ride. I never had any idea how similar our cultures and our people would be, but it's really been great to see. There's tons of respect between the striker and right folks, and it's just been great. I ask you all to challenge us to grow and get better as a foot and ankle team, and I'll leave you with this one last thought, that this is just the beginning. We're going to continue to innovate, to educate, to learn and grow. We've got a thousand people in our foot and ankle team at Striker Foot and Ankle here every day, dedicated to you all and everything you're doing. Thank you so much, Dr. Blumen and the board, for recognizing us and our contributions. Have a great week, and I hope to see you all in the exhibit hall. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, one more piece of business for me, and then I'm going to hand off to Mike Clare. Is Amgad Halim here? Come on up here. So this year, the board approved a challenge match for the young physicians, and this was held from mid-May to August of 2021, and the challenge was to get as many individual young physician surgeons to donate, irrespective of amount, and they answered. We had 80 donors that equated to 36% of the young physicians, and this was over $9,000 in contributions from both fellows and candidates. The donors got to choose where the fund was contributed to and where it was directed. Just to put this in perspective, 36%, it may seem pretty low, but for nonprofit organizations nationwide, the average rate of donation is somewhere around 6%, so these guys have done an amazing job, and it's a great start, and it bodes well for not only the foundation, but also for the AOFAS. So a big round of applause for them. Amgad. If Amanda's here, we'd love to have her up, too. So the match was that whatever they raised, we were going to match. And so these outsized checks are representative of their outsized donations. So this is over $18,000 for the foundation and for the society. Thank you, Dr. Bruman. And Amanda led the task force on this, so kudos to her and to all my task force members on the Young Physician Committee. Thank you, sir. Thanks for sticking with us here. I'm going to hand off to Mike Clare. He's got one thing to tell us about. I'm the outgoing chair of the Awards and Scholarships Committee, and one of the tasks of this committee is to be involved with the Resident Scholarship Program. And so this presentation is to acknowledge them. So this program was founded in 2010 and had a whopping 21 scholars, and now we're into year 12. And over the last several years, this program has literally exploded. This program is made possible through generous grants from our industry partners, including Stryker, Arthrex, and Integra. This year, we were able to bring 80 scholars from 59 different orthopedic programs. You see the breakdown of PGY1, 2s, and 3s, so these are people with a legitimate, genuine interest in foot and ankle. This is a talented group of young surgeons with strong letters of support that are truly interested in foot and ankle as a subspecialty career and getting involved with AOFAS. So without naming names, here they are. And if you happen to run into them, introduce yourself and welcome them to our program. Thanks.

Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Foundation

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