Yale

Kristaps J. Kreggi began his career as a pioneering orthopedic surgeon and award-winning medical educator when he came to the United States in 1949 as a fifteen-year-old refugee from postwar Latvia. Less than two years later he entered Yale on scholarship; as an undergraduate, he captained a fencing team that posted the best record in a span of three decades. Thereafter he attended Yale Medical School and performed his surgical residency at what is now Yale - New Haven Hospital. 

Following two years of distinguished service attached to a mobile surgical hospital in Vietnam, Kreggi returned to Yale in 1966 to teach and to practice orthopedic surgery. He has worked as a clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at Yale and director of the joint replacement center at Waterbury Hospital. Yale orthopedics have honored Kreggi with their teaching prize on six occasions, recognizing his visionary techniques of minimally invasive hip surgery and the use of ceramics in joint replacement. 

In 1988 Kreggi established the Kreggi Orthopedic Foundation to fund educational and research efforts. The foundation has sponsored the training of over two hundred orthopedic fellows at Yale and at Waterbury Hospital. Internationally renowned, Kreggi has received honorary doctorates from the Larvin Medical Academy and Quinnipiac University, and is one of only a few Americans named a member of the Russian Academy of Science in Medicine.