Caird appointed interim chair of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery

Associate Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery Michelle S. Caird, M.D., has been appointed interim chair of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery by the board of regents, effective May 1.

Caird is the Larry S. Matthews, M.D., Collegiate Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery in the Division of Pediatric Orthopaedics. She takes over leadership of the department from James E. Carpenter, M.D., who served as chair since 2003.

Under Carpenter’s leadership, the department has grown to nearly 50 faculty and 400 staff who collaborate with several disciplines at Michigan Medicine and across the state to treat patients with injuries and congenital, developmental or degenerative problems of  the musculoskeletal system. He helped to launch the new Michigan Center for Human Athletic Medicine and Performance, and the department has achieved a top-five ranking among orthopedic surgery departments in research funding from the National Institutes of Health.

Caird has been involved extensively in administrative activities, initially serving as assistant residency director. In 2015, she was appointed program director of the Orthopaedic Residency Program and associate chair for education for the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. In the summer of 2018, she served as acting chair of the department for three months. In 2019, she was appointed as the chief of the Division of Pediatric Orthopaedics.

She earned her undergraduate engineering degree and medical degree from U-M. After completing a residency here and a fellowship at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, she joined the U-M faculty in 2004 as a lecturer. She rose to associate professor in 2014. She was named the Matthews Professor in 2016.

Clinically, Caird treats multiple orthopaedic conditions faced by children including fractures, spinal deformity and unequal or bowed legs. As director of the Osteogenesis Imperfecta Multidisciplinary Clinic, her areas of expertise include treating fractures and spinal deformity in children with osteogenesis imperfecta, and in the laboratory she investigates bone healing in this disease.