Michelle Welborn, M.D., FAAOS, is the chief of spine surgery and president of the medical staff at Shriners Children’s Portland and the Diane Ruth Abramson Professor of Pediatric Orthopedic and Burn Surgery. She is an associate professor of clinical orthopaedic surgery at Oregon Health Sciences University. She received her undergraduate at University California Berkeley, medical degree at Pennsylvania State University, and completed an orthopedic surgery residency at University of Illinois. Following this, she completed a fellowship in pediatric orthopedics and spinal deformity at University of Utah. She then joined the staff at Shriners Children’s Portland in 2016. Dr. Welborn is active in AAOS, POSNA, Pediatric Spine Study Group and the Scoliosis Research Society. She is the past chair of the SRS Research Grant Committee, and currently serves as a member of the board of the SRS, the educational courses committee chair of POSNA and the research grant committee chair of the PSSG.
She has a particular interest in growth and its impact on spinal deformity, early onset scoliosis, syndromic scoliosis, and skeletal dysplasias, including osteogenesis imperfecta. She is the head of the multicenter BLISS (Biomarker Longitudinal Idiopathic Scoliosis Study) Study Group and has collaborated on multiple prospective international studies looking at the impact of growth on spinal deformity. Dr. Welborn has received both the Thomas Whitecloud Award for Best Basic Science Paper at IMAST and the POSNA Best Basic Science Paper award and has been nominated for the SRS Hibbs Award Best Basic Science Paper. She received the SRS Edgar Dawson traveling fellowship in 2018 and the full SRS traveling fellowship in 2023, and is an editor for Spine, Spine Deformity and Journal of Pediatric Orthopaedics.
Dr. Welborn knows that having a scoliosis diagnosis can be scary for families, and she is committed to being there with them through the whole journey. Her goal is for their experience at the hospital to overall be a positive experience and a source of strength, and wants each of her patients to know that they can be proud of themselves and they can do hard things!
In her free time Dr. Welborn hangs out with her husband and twin boys hiking, biking and skiing in the Pacific Northwest.
