Dr. Angelo Capozzi is a Board Certified Plastic Surgeon and co-founder of Rotaplast International. Dr. Capozzi was born in Solvay, New York. He is married to Louise Armanetti Capozzi, and they have three grown children and one grandchild. He is a proud Notre Dame Alumni having received his Bachelor of Science in 1956. He received his medical degree from the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University in Chicago, then completed his residency in general surgery training at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Illinois, and a plastic surgery specialty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Dr. Capozzi was a Captain in the United States Air Force and served as Chief of Plastic Surgery at David Grant Air Force Hospital in Fairfield, California. In 1968, he went into private practice at St. Francis Memorial Hospital remaining there for 30 years. He left private practice in 1998 to become Chief of Plastic Surgery at Shriners Hospital for Children in Sacramento, California, retiring in 2008. Dr. Capozzi has also served as Director of the Bothin Burn Center, Chief of Plastic Surgery at Saint Mary’s Hospital, Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Surgery at University of California-San Francisco (UCSF), and as an advisory panel member for the California Medical Association.
In 1971, Dr. Capozzi became a member of the San Francisco Rotary Club and now belongs to Tiburon/Belvedere Rotary Club. In 1992, Dr. Capozzi and PDG Peter Lagarias founded Rotaplast International in collaboration with the Rotary Club of San Francisco to facilitate a surgical program in La Serena, Chile. This initial historic mission to treat children with the cleft lip and palate anomaly, who would otherwise not receive surgical intervention, took place in January of 1993.
As a project of the Rotary Club of San Francisco, and for the first three years of its existence, Rotaplast completed one surgical mission a year. The following two years, Rotaplast completed two missions a year. In 1996, Rotaplast became a separate non-profit corporation and has since consistently expanded its number of annual missions. In December 2023, Rotaplast sent its 258th mission and to date has served over 21,000 patients. Twenty-six countries have hosted Rotaplast teams, including Vietnam, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, El Salvador, Romania, China, Ethiopia, India, Nepal, Brazil, Bangladesh, Mali, Togo, Liberia, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Tanzania, Myanmar, and the Philippines.
Dr. Capozzi now devotes his practice to humanitarian medicine and international service. To date, he has been on 76 international surgical trips with Rotaplast, including Sylhet five times and eight trips to Bangladesh. Dr. Capozzi currently serves as Rotaplast’s Medical Director and International Committee Chair.