Dr. Lee Rubin, a nationally recognized expert in hip and knee joint replacement surgery, was recently promoted to full professor in November 2025 and has been appointed as the inaugural Kristaps J. Keggi Professor of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation, effective March 3, 2026.
A member of the Yale School of Medicine (YSM) faculty since 2017, Rubin has served both as the section chief of Yale's Division of Hip & Knee Joint Reconstruction and as chief of the Yale New Haven Hospital (YNHH) total joint replacement program.
Rubin is the founding program director of the Yale Hip & Knee Arthroplasty Fellowship, which is currently training its 5th arthroplasty fellow. This program is the only joint replacement fellowship in the State of Connecticut and attracts an average of 120 applicants for a single position each year. The fellowship is the only such program in the United States to include an internally funded 2-week international traveling educational experience, which is supported by philanthropy to the Keggi-Kimball International Fund for Orthopaedic Education. Over the last 4 years, the Yale Arthroplasty fellows have been able to visit and operate with host surgeons in Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, South Africa, and India.
Rubin is a leading expert in a minimally invasive approach to hip replacement called the direct anterior approach (DAA) and was one of the few physicians in the U.S. to learn the DAA directly during a yearlong adult reconstruction fellowship with Dr. Kristaps J. Keggi, professor emeritus of orthopaedics and rehabilitation at YSM, who pioneered the anterior hip approach at Yale in the 1970s. In 2016, he and Keggi published the world's first comprehensive text on anterior hip surgery, titled "The Direct Anterior Approach to Hip Reconstruction." In 2024, as editor-in-chief, Rubin comprehensively updated and published an all-new "2nd Edition" of this textbook.
In his new role as the Keggi Professor, Rubin will continue his clinical practice at Yale /YNHH, will remain the Arthroplasty Fellowship program director, and will serve as the YNHH System Chief of Arthroplasty, working to coordinate the policies, operations, logistics, and value-based care delivery for joint replacement across the YNHHS.
Rubin will continue as the program director for the Keggi-Kimball Visiting Scholars Program, which hosts international surgeons at Yale for a six- to eight-week intensive observation visits with the Yale arthroplasty faculty. The visiting scholars are young surgeons and "emerging leaders" in their home countries and have traveled to Yale over the past nine years from India, Vietnam, Japan, China, Italy, Ghana, Turkey, Republic of Georgia, Canada, Latvia, Lebanon, and Israel.
Inspired by Dr. Keggi's life and legacy, Rubin has worked to broadly advance international orthopaedic education, with invitations to teach on multiple continents over the last few years. Rubin was selected to represent the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) to deliver a keynote address on public policy surrounding outpatient arthroplasty care in the United States at the 2023 Society of Italian Orthopaedics & Traumatology (SIOT) in Rome. He represented the AAOS as Invited Faculty for the AAOS Masterclass Webinar Series in partnership with the Indian Orthopaedic Society (India) (2021), then later participated in the first-ever AAOS Webinar Conference Broadcasts to African surgeons in Tanzania (July 2022) and later in Zambia, Kenya, and Uganda (December 2022).
Rubin delivered the inaugural address at the 2024 European Hip Society's Update on Direct Anterior Approach for Total Hip Replacement Meeting in Barcelona, Spain, delivered a keynote lecture for the Trichy Ortho Society via Zoom in Tamil Nadu State, India (2024), delivered three podium research presentations at the SICOT World Orthopaedic Congress in Madrid (2025), and was an invited guest speaker at the November 2025 Israel Hip & Knee Society meeting in Zichron Ya'akov, Israel, visiting with a delegation of American Surgeons selected to represent the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons (AAHKS).
In April 2026, he participated as faculty for the DePuy Latin American Forum Master's Course, which hosted more than 50 surgeons from across Central and South America. Rubin has invitations to visit and teach at conferences in Hue City, (Vietnam), Tblisi, (Republic of Georgia), Jerusalem (Israel), and Merida (Mexico) in the upcoming academic year.
In 2025, the Department of Orthopaedics & Rehabilitation established the Keggi Memorial Lectureship, which will honor Keggi's Legacy and invite an internationally acclaimed Arthroplasty surgeon-educator to Yale each spring to teach and mentor the residents and faculty. The first Distinguished Guest Professors for this speaker series included Dr. Rajesh Malhotra in 2025, the former chair of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, India, and Dr. Cesare Faldini in 2026, the current director of the Rizzoli Institute in Bologna, Italy.
Rubin's research has focused on improving outcomes in hip and knee arthroplasty through innovative surgical approaches, prosthetic design, postoperative recovery optimization, and reduction of complication rates. Using large datasets, he has explored a wide range of contemporary topics, such as the impact of GLP-1 agents on surgical outcomes in Type 2 Diabetes patients, the impact of fellowship training on surgical outcomes, and the national impact of federal policy changes on orthopaedic practice patterns in the United States. He has investigated surgical outcomes for adult patients with rare diseases undergoing hip & knee replacement surgeries, such as for those impacted by cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, Post-Polio syndrome, Marfan syndrome, and hemophilia.
With support from Department Chair Dr. Lisa Lattanza, Rubin has allocated funding from the Keggi Professorship endowment to establish a new Arthroplasty Research Fellowship and has hired Dr. George Rublev to serve as the first funded researcher as of May 1, 2026. The mission of this newly funded position will be to advance the research aims for the Division by driving successful clinical projects which will advance Yale's trainees and faculty towards earning national and international recognition.
Rubin is an elite reviewer and editorial board member for the Journal of Arthroplasty, a founding editorial board member of Arthroplasty Today, and has served for 16 years as a core faculty member for the International Congress for Joint Reconstruction and the International Master's Anterior Course.
Rubin earned his M.D. from Tufts University School of Medicine in 2004, completed an internship and residency in orthopaedic surgery at Yale New Haven Hospital in 2009, a fellowship in adult reconstruction with the Keggi Orthopedic Foundation and Waterbury Hospital in 2010, and earned a certificate from the Yale School of Management's Emerging Leaders Program in 2020. Before joining the YSM faculty as an associate professor in 2017, he was an assistant professor at University Orthopedics and Brown University.
