Originally published in APMA News, May/June 2026, pages 16–23.
The May/June 2026 issue of APMA News devotes eight pages to a two-part feature: a profile of David G. Armstrong, DPM, MD, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Surgery and Neurological Surgery at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, followed by a companion interview with Alexandria Armstrong, DPM, chief resident at UT Health San Antonio — and a third-generation podiatric surgeon in the family.
The profile opens with a question rather than a résumé: how do you measure a career, and can you quantify it at all? The numbers are there — more than 700 papers, more than 120 books and chapters, over 93,000 citations, an h-index of 133 — and the magazine puts them up front mainly to argue that they are the least interesting thing about the story.
What colleagues said
APMA News interviewed four people who have watched the arc up close: Lawrence Harkless, DPM; Adam Isaac, DPM; Lawrence Lavery, DPM, MPH; and Stephanie Wu, DPM, MS.
Dr. Harkless recalled first meeting Dr. Armstrong at an interview for the diabetic limb salvage fellowship at UT Southwestern, and described a young clinician with unusual energy and one particular gift: he could write. Writing, as Dr. Harkless framed it, is how you shape ideas, influence others, and establish authority — and it was put to work early.
Dr. Lavery described the research partnership that followed, which produced 113 papers together, with several years running north of 20 papers annually. This was before multidisciplinary research was fashionable; the group pulled in a statistician who taught at the US Military Academy and a physician who ran a gait lab, on the theory that the interesting questions were sitting at the seams between disciplines.
Dr. Isaac, asked to describe the impact of the work on his own career, answered with a single word: immeasurable. He also recounted a fellowship interview that did not go the way he had prepared for. He had studied up on the publications, braced for a grilling on ulcers and wound healing, and was instead asked what his plans were for the rest of his life.
Dr. Wu recalled meeting Dr. Armstrong when she was a chief resident at Inova Fairfax, and being struck that someone with a meeting at FDA still volunteered time to speak with residents. She is now dean of Scholl College. The line she carried forward: you are not ultimately measured by what you personally accomplish — your legacy is determined by the people you inspire and mentor.
Dr. Harkless offered the sentence most likely to outlive the article. The profession, he said, needs more “Armstrongs” — meaning leaders who integrate podiatry into mainstream medicine and mentor the next generation. Somewhere along the way the surname became a common noun.
The Q&A
Asked about ambition, Dr. Armstrong reframed it as restlessness — a habit learned watching his father, Leo Armstrong, DPM, and noticing early that the questions outnumbered the answers, especially for patients losing limbs. Publishing, in that telling, is simply how clinicians talk to one another across time and distance. If you see something at the bedside that could help someone else’s patient, you have an obligation to write it down.
For anyone thinking about doing more research, the advice was practical and stubbornly unglamorous:
- Start with what is in front of you. The clinic is a laboratory. You do not need a million-dollar grant to write a compelling case report or a small prospective series.
- Find collaborators outside your comfort zone — engineers, data scientists, nurses, vascular surgeons, endocrinologists. As he put it in the interview, the best work has come from putting weird ideas together with weird people.
- Just start. The gap between thinking about publishing and publishing is almost always a first draft.
On what he is most proud of, the answer was people: the residents and fellows who went on to do extraordinary things — and, personally, a daughter who is now a podiatric surgeon and chief resident at UT San Antonio, whose program director, Lee Rogers, DPM, is a former fellow. Beyond that, the community built around limb preservation, and the founding of the American Limb Preservation Society as a multidisciplinary home for everyone who touches the limb-threatened patient.
On the future: a wish that podiatric physicians and surgeons be recognized as the front line of limb preservation by payers, health systems, and the public — and that the specialty stop being the best-kept secret in medicine.
Also flagged in the Q&A: the NIH-funded REBOOT study, a multicenter randomized controlled trial of minimally invasive floating metatarsal osteotomy to prevent diabetic foot ulcer recurrence, running across USC, UT San Antonio, and Johns Hopkins; and continued work at the NSF-funded Center to Stream Healthcare in Place (C2SHiP) on continuous home monitoring with consumer-grade technology. The premise of both: the future of foot care will look more like what happens between visits than what happens during them.
The better half
The companion piece, “The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree,” is an interview with Alexandria Armstrong, DPM, and it is the more interesting read.
Podiatry was not the plan. She grew up around the profession and respected the work it demanded, but it was a trip during her junior year of college — traveling with her father to Bergamo, Italy, where Antonino Cassini, MD, and Giacomo Clerici, MD, welcomed her into the operating room — that settled the question.
The best professional advice she received was two words: just dive in. Residency is three years and they move faster than expected; the instruction was to embrace every opportunity and step outside the comfort zone.
Asked where she and her father disagree, she noted there is very little fundamental disagreement about values in patient care and education — differences tend to be about treatment strategy and clinical decision making, and she describes those conversations as valuable precisely because they force her to think critically and consider more than one approach.
Asked what most people do not know about him, she named the work ethic and the curiosity, then went somewhere better: a deep passion for history. On a recent visit to the British Museum with limited time, her father became the family’s personal tour guide, moving from exhibit to exhibit and connecting the artifacts into a story. Watching him in his element — teaching — is one of her favorite memories of him.
She also observed that he somehow knows more about social media than she does, and that he has probably forgotten more about podiatry than she has learned so far.
The feature, in cards
Read it
The full feature runs on pages 16–23 of the May/June 2026 issue of APMA News, available in the APMA News digital archive or directly in the digital issue.
With thanks to APMA News and to Drs. Harkless, Isaac, Lavery, and Wu for their generosity — and to APMA, which remains, as noted in the interview, the professional family.
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