Elizaveta Kon to be appointed Full Professor of Musculoskeletal Diseases at Humanitas University, she is the first woman in Italy

She is the first woman to become a full professor in Musculoskeletal Diseases in Italy, an important step forward for a specialisation where women make up only 7-9 per cent of it, and even worldwide the percentage remains the same.

A journey that began in the 1990s when Elizaveta Kon was one of the first three students to leave the former USSR to study in Italy, two at the University of Rome and Elizaveta in Bologna. After graduating and specialising in orthopaedics, she continued working at the same university and at the Rizzoli Orthopaedic Institute until 2017, when, together with Professor Alessandro Castagna and Professor Maurilio Marcacci, she was asked to create the Chair of Orthopaedics and Traumatology at Humanitas University in Rozzano, where she was appointed Associate Professor. Joining a young University, founded in 2014 is an interesting challenge with an opportunity to build innovative paths and to do research both in the field of regenerative medicine and 3D printing for the creation of customised prostheses. Elizaveta accepted the challenge and continued her path until her recent appointment as Full Professor.

‘It is a great satisfaction to be the first woman to be appointed full professor, although I believe that it has taken a little too long for a woman to get to the chair of Orthopaedics and Traumatology. On the other side though, orthopaedics has always been and continues to be a male-dominated field,’ explains Professor Kon, who is also head of the Regenerative Orthopaedics section of the Centre for Joint and Biological Knee Reconstruction at Humanitas Research Hospital. ‘Numbers speak for themselves: the orthopaedic specialty has only 15.4 per cent female residents, the lowest percentage of all residents, a number which increased by 27.3 per cent over the past 10 years but remains too low. On several occasions in my life, I have had to be a ‘pathfinder’ and this entails commitment and responsibility’.

From the outset, her passion for research led her to engage in the field of regenerative medicine, as well as in clinical and surgical practice. Until 2017, she was head of the Nano Biotechnology Laboratory of the RIT (Research, Innovation and Technology) Department of the Rizzoli Institute. During the same years, she was a Research Fellow of Musculoskeletal Diseases at the University of Bologna.

During 2022-2023 she was President of ICRS, the International Cartilage Regeneration & Joint preservation society, the leading international association in cartilage tissue and joint preservation research. She currently holds the role of President of SIAGASCOT (Italian Society of Arthroscopy, Knee, Upper Limb, Sport. Cartilage and Orthopaedic Technologies) making her once again the first woman to lead the most important Community of Orthopaedic Specialists in Italy.

‘At Humanitas University, care, research and teaching go hand in hand,’ Professor Kon explains. ‘There are currently 35 resident doctors, 6 of whom are women. This School of Specialisation is highly sought-after, in fact, we rank within the top three Schools of Orthopaedics in Italy. Besides research in orthopaedics and regenerative medicine, we also collaborate a lot with Hunimed’s MEDTEC course in various areas. Our department has created a Master’s Degree in Regenerative Medicine in Orthopaedics, which from this year is the first international master’s degree in collaboration with the University of Krems in Austria’. And, she concludes, ‘We are working on numerous research and non-research projects, and one of them is certainly to make orthopaedics less male-dominated’.