Distinguished Achievement Award
Louis C. Argenta, M.D.
Louis C. Argenta (M.D. 1969, Residencies 1977 and 1979) founded the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Wake Forest University and served as the Distinguished Howell Professor and chair for 20 years before earning emeritus status.
Dr. Argenta graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1969. Following a surgical internship at the U-M, he was called to the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. He returned to Michigan to complete his general surgery residency, then was invited to France for a craniofacial fellowship. For the next seven years, he served on the U-M surgical faculty, rising to the rank of associate professor and interim head of the Section of Plastic Surgery. In 1988, he accepted an invitation to establish the Department of Plastic Surgery at Wake Forest as professor and chair.
He is an internationally recognized expert in the science of mechanobiology and its applications to clinical medicine. Early in his career at the U-M, Dr. Argenta and classmate Eric D. Austad (M.D. 1969, Residencies 1975 and 1978) developed clinical techniques called mechanical tissue expansion to generate living tissue for reconstruction. These techniques are used throughout the world for breast, facial, scalp and other reconstructions. In 1995, he became the first physician to correlate deformities of the infant skull with the “back to sleep” to prevent SIDS campaign.
Dr. Argenta’s most notable discovery is the development of Vacuum Assisted Closure, a means of treating difficult wounds and burns. This technique is estimated to have prevented 200,000 amputations.
For the past 15 years, Dr. Argenta and his family have devoted a month a year to providing medical care to disadvantaged children of the Third World.