Highlighting the leaders
shaping the future of academic orthopaedics
Each month, the AOC Leadership Profile Series highlights three leaders from across our consortium who are shaping departments, influencing culture, and advancing patient care in meaningful ways. Through candid reflections on strategy, challenges, mentorship, AI, and more, this series offers a rare look inside the mindset of those leading academic orthopaedics forward. At the AOC, we believe the collective wisdom of our membership is one of our greatest assets. By sharing stories, lessons learned, and perspectives across institutions, we strengthen the entire network.
We are proud to feature this month’s leaders and grateful for the trust they place in our community.
Leesa M. Galatz, MD, MBA
Chair of Orthopaedic Surgery – Mount Sinai
Dr. Leesa Galatz opens with the growing burden of third-party payer interference and its cost to patients, surgeons, and health systems alike, then turns to her goals for the next three years: helping early-career faculty build the practices they envisioned when they chose academics, expanding capacity for funded clinical trials, and developing cross-departmental programs including a new women’s health center and a fracture liaison service. She discusses why she sees the future of musculoskeletal care in integrated service lines, what the AOC has offered her and her administrative staff, and a hard-won championship season with her Morgan horse.
Nicholas Paddock
Senior Director – University Orthopaedic Center at University of Utah Health
Nicholas Paddock is navigating a major system restructure, working to preserve his department’s entrepreneurial energy as previously localized functions move toward centralization. He shares the accomplishments he is proudest of—bringing the Surgical Skills Training Lab to financial sustainability and restructuring the department into ten specialty divisions with a realigned financial architecture—along with goals that include synchronizing hiring plans with the opening of a new hospital in West Valley City and bringing outsourced DME operations in-house. He speaks candidly about the constant barrage of information as a threat to deliberate leadership, and about AI’s potential to free care teams from routine tedium.
Chad Evans
MedTech Advisory Executive Committee
VP/GM Customer Solutions – Stryker
Chad Evans examines the challenge of alignment at speed in large, complex healthcare organizations—aligning strategy, incentives, and execution across functions while markets and customer needs evolve faster than internal processes can absorb. Drawing on a global medical technology career, he shares why he would eliminate the friction between innovation and scale, how an enterprise-oriented approach to partnering with ambulatory surgery centers changes the nature of customer relationships, and where the AOC’s digital platform could move beyond content sharing to curate purpose-driven connections.