NASS DFNS CLASS OF 2026
Yong Hai, MD, PhD
Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, Capital Medical University
Beijing, China
Orthopedic Surgeon
NASS Member Since 1997
Tell us about one of your mentors and the best piece of advice they gave you.
One of my most influential mentors was Dr. Casey K. Lee, at New Jersey Medical School, where I completed my spinal surgery fellowship. Dr. Lee, who later served as NASS President, gave me an idea I have carried through the rest of my career: as physicians, our job is to find the underlying scientific question hidden within each patient's clinical problem, and let the process of diagnosis and treatment reveal the most appropriate solution. That framework has shaped how I approach every complex deformity case since — treating each patient not just as a technical challenge, but as a question worth understanding on its own terms.
What initially inspired you to become involved with NASS, and what has kept you engaged over the years?
I joined NASS in 1997, making me one of the earliest members from mainland China. At the time, international collaboration in spine care was still limited, and NASS was one of the few societies actively opening its doors to surgeons from outside North America. What has kept me engaged for nearly three decades is watching that openness turn into real exchange — serving on the International Education Committee, the Section on Motion Preservation, and the Clinical Guideline Committee gave me a genuine role in shaping how our field approaches patient care globally. More than any single project, it has been meaningful to watch more of my Chinese colleagues find their own place within NASS in the years since.
What accomplishment are you most proud of, and why?
I'm most proud of the work I've built around complex and severe spinal deformity — cases involving significant curvature, congenital malformation, or prior failed surgery, where patients often have nowhere left to turn. These are technically demanding operations with real neurological risk, and across more than 7,000 surgeries, my focus has been on making them safer: refining osteotomy techniques, building out neuromonitoring protocols, and more recently exploring how surgical robotics can improve precision in these cases. But the accomplishment I value most isn't any single technique — it's having trained the next generation of surgeons who are now carrying this work forward and improving on it.