Dean’s Message

July 2020

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, all of our energy was focused on adapting the entire dental school operation to allow for distance learning, emergency-only patient care and many other major changes. It is an ongoing and complex challenge that requires difficult decisions, updates and modifications every single day. Early in the process, stay-at-home orders and business closures meant printing the usual spring-summer edition of the magazine was not an option. Also, it was quickly apparent that the cost of revamping the school operation and a drastic drop in revenue from closed clinics would have a significant impact on the school’s annual budget. Eliminating the costs of printing the magazine and mailing it to nearly 10,000 people was one of many financial changes we made.

The resulting online version brings you dozens of news items about faculty, students, staff and alumni just as our printed M Dentistry magazine (formerly Dentalum) has done for many years. The Table of Contents page will guide you through the stories we have grouped into sections as we always have – Features, School, Faculty, Research, Dental Hygiene, Students and Alumni. We have included both stories that were posted on our website since last fall’s M Dentistry printed magazine, as well as many new stories written exclusively for this online magazine. The Table of Contents page allows you to quickly consider your reading options and click on stories you are particularly interested in, though we hope you will read all of them. When we did a reader survey two years ago, a common expression used by many of our alumni and friends was that they read the magazine “cover to cover.” We hope that continues in this new format, but perhaps we need to modify the description and call it “from the first story to the last.”

Our first story, what we would have called our Cover Story in the print magazine, provides a summary of how our incredible faculty, staff and administrators, when faced with the pandemic, restructured our operation in an amazingly short amount of time. They made countless decisions and completed myriad tasks so that our students could continue their education and our patients could have access to emergency care. It is a remarkable team effort that will go down as one of the major accomplishments in school history.

Many other articles in the magazine highlight how the school has continued to lead the profession of dentistry despite the pandemic. Our students, faculty, staff and researchers are implementing our mission of advancing health through education, service, research and discovery on a world-class level just as the school always has. Even as we changed, some things remained the same. The school has received major grants for cutting-edge research. Researchers continue to be published in important journals. Our faculty have won awards and appointments to university, state and national leadership positions. Partnering companies have made major gifts to our Blue Renew renovation project. Two of our students will lead national organizations this year. Former and current dental hygiene faculty wrote and edited an iconic textbook. Alumni are receiving recognition and contributing to the profession of dentistry in many ways across the country and around the world.

We invite you to browse the contents and become familiar with this new online format. Whether we will return to a print format for the fall magazine remains to be seen, like many other aspects of our lives. It seems likely that conveying information about the school in this online format will only grow over time. Just a few months ago, it would have seemed impossible that all of our students would be completing their courses entirely online, yet that is exactly what has happened. While educating dentists will always require in-person patient care and interaction with faculty, we have proven that moving didactic classroom education online is more viable than we might have predicted.

Whatever the future brings, I want to thank our alumni and friends for their continued loyalty to the school. I have heard from so many of you who sent best wishes or asked how you could help in this difficult time. It is important that we band together as current and former students, faculty, staff, friends and other supporters of this long tradition of excellence at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. An important part of that, particularly in this time of great change, is frequent communication. And that is why we have created this online magazine as a new way to keep our dental school community informed.

Kind regards, stay well and Go Blue!

Laurie K. McCauley, Dean
William K. & Mary Anne Najjar Professor

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