From the UConn Foundation’s e-newsletter, Our Moment (February-March 2012)

The School of Dental Medicine‘s Prosthodontic Residency Program will soon be able to offer its residents access to the latest technology for education, research and care, thanks to a $70,000 gift from the Cascade Foundation of Rockport, Maine. This gift, which will support the acquisition of several pieces of state of the art equipment, will also offer funding to establish a UConn Prosthodontics alumni relations program.

Graduates of specialty education programs provide unique services to the public. Prosthodontics is the American Dental Association recognized “dental specialty pertaining to the diagnosis, treatment planning, rehabilitation and maintenance of the oral function, comfort, appearance and health of patients with clinical conditions associated with missing or deficient teeth and/or oral and maxillofacial tissues using biocompatible substitutes.”

“UConn has one of the important schools of dental medicine in the United States,” the Cascade Foundation reported in a statement. “The integration of medicine and dental medicine in the first two years of a student’s education is innovative and sets the school apart. We believe that if UConn is to maintain and grow this status in the area of prosthodontics, it must have the most modern equipment in use, so that students leave the program with the knowledge they will be applying in the field on day one; they will be leaders right from graduation.”

“It’s difficult to overstate how important this gift is for us,” says Dr. John Agar, director of the Prosthodontic Specialty Graduate Program in the Department of Reconstructive Sciences. “These funds will elevate the quality of our program considerably by enabling residents to use newer innovative equipment for patient care. It provides opportunities for residents’ research using new technology. This grant directly and significantly improves every part of our mission: education, patient care and research conducted by residents.”

Agar also says the creation of a prosthodonics alumni program will advance the individual dentists involved and the specialty.

“By recognizing the success of our alumni as educators, practitioners and leaders, we are helping to provide each of them, and our residents, with a network of resources for growth and development. We expect that the new equipment provided through the Cascade gift will attract potential residents to our program, and we want to build a strong structure connecting them to the best in the field.”

The Cascade Foundation says that the school provided a unique opportunity for them to become involved.

“It was a thoughtful engagement on both our part, as well as that of the school, to get to this point. We tried to understand their needs, and identify how access to this equipment would improve teaching ability. We found it to be pretty fundamental; they needed very specific equipment to address the needs they had. We think this school should be recognized and rewarded as one of the very few places that the brightest students can go to master the skills that they will embrace out in the community.”

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