May 14, 2008 | Archive

Topics at a glance: Seeking adventure dentistry? UTDB senior says Alaska delivers … Fondren Foundation donates $850,000 for UTDB building … Faculty promotions, tenure announced for Dental Branch … Dental student wins scholarship … Kroeger Research Scholarships awarded

Seeking adventure dentistry? UTDB senior says Alaska delivers

In the summer of 2007, UT Dental Branch student Jill Rosellini went to Barrow, Alaska to spend a month working in a tribal-owned dental clinic. The 26-year-old Dallas native fell in love with the adventure-charged North Slope community 330 miles inside the Arctic Circle.

True, the only "trees" in town were made of whale bones. The 24-hour sunlight messed with her sleep, and the only way in or out of Barrow was by plane. But Rosellini, who will graduate from UTDB later this month, found the experience so meaningful that she's heading back to Alaska in 2009 to practice for two years.

"It's a whole different world up there," she says. "When we have blunt trauma here in Houston, you think gunshots. In Barrow, blunt trauma was a guy trying to jump his snowmobile over an ice wall because he saw a polar bear and wanted to escape, and he fell and knocked out all his teeth. When would that ever happen here?" Read more...

Updated sketch of proposed UTDB replacement building

Fondren Foundation donates $850,000 for UTDB building

The Fondren Foundation of Houston has awarded an $850,000 grant to The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston to help build a new facility for the UT Dental Branch.

The gift will reinforce state funds already dedicated to the project and will allow students to learn and train in a contemporary and technologically sophisticated environment that mirrors the future direction of dentistry. "We're very grateful for this generous gift from the Fondren Foundation," said UTDB Dean Catherine M. Flaitz, D.D.S. "Their investment in dental education will yield decades of dividends paid not in dollars, but in oral health care delivered by generations of future dentists and dental hygienists who will be educated inside our walls."

After 52 years at the corner of Moursund Street and M.D. Anderson Boulevard, the Dental Branch plans to move to new quarters off Old Spanish Trail and Cambridge Street. Phase 1 of the $90 million dental building project will be part of the 100-acre UT Research Park complex now under construction.

In the new location, Houston's only dental school will be very close to several state-of-the-art research facilities, including UT's new Biomedical Research and Education Facility, a new Neuroscience Building, and the Center for Advanced Biomedical Imaging Research, due for completion later this year. A parking garage is part of the construction project.

The university broke ground on the projects in August 2007. The new dental school is expected to open in 2011.

Faculty promotions, tenure announced

Dean Catherine M. Flaitz, D.D.S., announced the following promotions and tenure awards, which will take effect in September:

• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
  • Kamal F. Busaidy, DDS
  • Associate Professor
  Pediatric Dentistry
  • Jung-Wei Chen, DDS, PhD
  • Associate Professor
• Periodontics, School of Dental Hygiene
  • Harold A. Henson, RDH
  • Associate Professor
• Restorative Dentistry and Biomaterials
  • Sudarat Kiat-amnuay, DDS
  • Associate Professor with tenure (Clinician/Educator Pathway)
  •  
  • Joe C. Ontiveros, DDS
  • Associate Professor

Kroeger Research Scholarships awarded

Four second-year dental students have been chosen to receive a Dr. Donald Charles Kroeger Student Research Scholarship of $1,000 each. The scholarships are awarded each spring to students interested in the basic sciences with an application toward pharmacology, which was the late Dr. Kroeger's area of expertise while a faculty member at the UT Dental Branch. Pictured from left are Associate Professor Vahn A. Lewis, Pharm.D.,
Ph.D.; scholarship winners Kirk Webster and Geoff McMurray; UTDB Dean Catherine M. Flaitz, D.D.S.; and scholarship winners Sarah Azhar and Stephen Chen.