About Erik Hansen, MD

Dr. Erik N. Hansen is a Professor of Clinical Orthopaedic Surgery and Section Chief in the Arthroplasty Division at UCSF.  Dr. Hansen also serves as the section’s clinical fellowship director. 

His clinical and academic interests revolve around primary total joint arthroplasty, including the direct anterior approach to hip replacement surgery, as well as complex revision surgery. 

Apart from his clinical practice, Dr. Hansen has a strong commitment to clinical research dating back to his medical school education. At that time, he took an additional year off to work in an orthopaedic basic science laboratory to understand the fundamentals of fracture healing. In residency, he was selected from his class to do an extra year of research, during which time he worked on several clinical projects focused on total joint replacement, orthopaedic trauma, and medical education. Over the past several years, multiple projects which he has collaborated on have been recognized for prestigious national awards, including the James A. Rand Young Investigator Award, the Mark Coventry Award, and the Chitranjan Ranawat Award. He currently serves as the UCSF lead investigator collaborating with several other major academic institutions on multicenter, prospective randomized clinical trials focused on improving outcomes following revision joint replacement surgery. 

Dr. Hansen is also a co-director of the UCSF Arthroplasty for the Modern Surgeon: Hip, Knee and Health Innovation Technology, a continuing medical education course held annually in the Napa Valley.

Dr. Hansen completed his undergraduate education in Human Biology at Stanford University. Following this time, he spent a year in Mainland China studying acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine as well as an additional year in Mexico volunteering in a hospital. As a result of these experiences, he is proficient in both Mandarin Chinese as well as Spanish in the clinical setting. He then matriculated at the University of California, San Francisco medical school, than continued on at UCSF for completion of his orthopaedic surgery residency training. Dr. Hansen then went to the prestigious Rothman Institute at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia for an Adult Reconstruction fellowship. He returned to UCSF Department of Orthoapedic Surgery in 2012 as a faculty member.