Dr. Louis Faillace joined the Medical School as the school’s founding chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in 1971, and was recruited by Dr. Cheves Smythe.
Faillace served as interim dean of the Medical School following the resignation of Dr. Ernst Knobil. He played a key role in several important clinical affiliations and decisions in the formative years of the Medical School, including the UT affiliation with the Harris County Psychiatric Center, the Medical School’s affiliation with the Harris County Hospital District’s Lyndon Baines Johnson General Hospital, and the transfer from the state of the Texas Research Institute for Mental Sciences to the UT Mental Sciences Institute in 1985.
He earned his medical degree from Marquette University School of Medicine and completed an internship at Boston City Hospital. He was an assistant resident at Bellevue Hospital in psychiatry and completed research fellowships at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center and Harvard University. He completed an additional residency in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. He served as chair of the Department of Psychiatry until 1987.
He presently is a professor emeritus of psychiatry. The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences was named in his honor in 2019, making it the Louis A. Faillace, MD Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.