(1897-1961), at 34, was the youngest member of the founding foursome, but he was clearly the leader of the group, since he was its first President in 1932-1933.

He grew up on a farm in central New York State and graduated from Cornell in 1918.

In 1922 he received his M.D. at Harvard.

Internships and residencies were served at Memorial Hospital in New York and the Brigham.

In 1924-1925 Van Wagenen was Assistant Resident to Cushing. Thus, he was the only one of the four founders who was actually trained by Cushing in the full sense of the term. After his year with Cushing, Van Wagenen was a surgical resident at the Rochester General Hospital.

In 1928 he was appointed Assistant Professor in Neurosurgery and Chief of the Neurosurgical Service at the recently opened medical school of the University of Rochester. In Van Wagenen's “Record” of the organizational meeting of October 10, 1931, he remarked that he had proposed the idea of a brain tumor registry to Cushing, but the older man was not then in favor of the it.

In 1939, Van Wagenen and a colleague began the world's first series of corpus callosotomies in epileptic patients, though he later expressed some regret about that undertaking.

He retired at age 57 and enjoyed life until his early death at 64.