Future dental students will someday walk under an entrance bearing the name of one of East Carolina University’s most generous donors.
The ECU Board of Trustees named the School of Dentistry building after Dr. Ledyard E. Ross, an 84-year-old retired orthodontist and ECU alumnus who gave $4 million to the School of Dentistry—one of the largest one-time gifts in ECU’s history. Ross’s gift will support several academic interests for the school, including student scholarships and faculty research.
“First of all, you’ve got to have good instructors, and we want to help get good instructors because the dentists aren’t any better than the instructors,” Ross said. “The instructors have got to be top notch.”
Ross’s mother and sister also attended ECU, as well as one of his daughters. A former Marine who took advantage of the GI Bill, Ross attended and graduated from then-East Carolina College, earned his master of science degree in orthodontics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and received a doctor of dental surgery from the Northwestern University Dental School.
Ross has supported several East Carolina initiatives and is also a member of the Leo Jenkins Society and the Order of the Cupola.
When it is finished, the 100,000-square-foot Ledyard E. Ross Hall will be the center for training students to be dentists as well as servants who provide regular health-care services to underserved communities. The first dental students will be admitted in fall 2011. The university expects to admit 50 students with each class.
On Thursday, February 25, Ross was honored during a private dinner at the Greenville Country Club, hosted by the ECU Medical & Health Sciences Foundation Inc. board. With nearly 90 people in attendance, including local dentists, Ross was recognized for his generosity and presented a small, heart-shaped chair to signify the big heart behind his contribution.
“It shows community confidence and support for the dental school at a very critical time, and it allows us to move full steam ahead with our plans to build the dental school,” said Carole Novick, president of the ECU Medical & Health Sciences Foundation Inc.
On Friday, February 26, the Board of Trustees officially announced Ross’s gift and recognized his generosity by naming the dental school building after him. Ross was received with a standing ovation from board members and the audience.
Chancellor Steve Ballard said the gift would have several benefits for the School of Dentistry.
“It will mean better faculty, retaining those faculty, world-class programs, and most importantly … that we will be getting North Carolinians into the ECU dental school, and we know that model works from the Brody School of Medicine and the Brody scholarships,” he said.
Not only is Ross’s gift one of the most generous donations ever received by any dental school in the country, it also will have a greater impact for the young school because it arrived at a critical juncture and during an economic downturn, said Dr. James R. Hupp, dean of the School of Dentistry.
“Dentists don’t have a lot of situations where a dentist is a hero, so this will be inspirational,” he said.
University officials don’t expect students to be the only ones who are inspired by Ross’s gift. When other people hear about his story, they might make a donation of their own.
“We’ve seen it happen at other places,” said Mickey Dowdy, vice chancellor of University Advancement. “It plants seeds about what can be, and I think people read about this and think about it themselves.”
The University of North Carolina Imaging Research Building brings together the School of Medicine, School of Pharmacy and the Institute for Nanomedicine for developing new therapies and drugs to combat cancer.
The synergy of combining all of these groups with the most advanced imaging equipment in the world enables scientists, clinicians and patients to have one unified physical and intellectual home for cancer research. The 10-story, 343,000 square foot building is set in the center of the University of North Carolina system flagship medical campus. Cancer, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, stroke – biomedical researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will be able to make strides in understanding and treating all of these diseases and more because of a $260 million investment to enhance the University’s imaging capabilities.
A new facility with the latest radiographic equipment will help UNC researchers better understand the exact events inside the body that lead to disease, and to track how new treatments work. This project has a sustainability goal of "Silver Certified" as scored by the USGBC LEED rating system.
“Imaging is a tool that can be used to accelerate discovery of new drugs and new treatments for cancer and virtually every other disease you can think of,” said School of Medicine vice dean for academic affairs and BRIC director, Dr. Etta Pisano. “Construction of this building is really a concerted effort by the entire university to improve our imaging capabilities.” Pisano is also Kenan Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering and a member of UNC’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Among the advanced equipment the new facility will add are a 7 Tesla MR (magnetic resonance) scanner, and a cyclotron that will enable UNC investigators to create short-life radioisotopes on site for the first time.
The 7 Tesla scanner, which will be one of the first few available in the world, will provide much higher resolution than the 1.5 or 3 Tesla scanners currently used in clinical studies, said Weili Lin, Ph.D., professor of radiology, neurology and biomedical engineering, associate director of the BRIC, and a Lineberger member.
Lin compares the difference between the 3 Tesla scanner and the 7 Tesla scanner to the difference between analog and digital TV.
“The 7T scanner will give us the ability to see more details and subtleties and the subtle changes that result from disease progression,” Lin said. Uses include examining subtleties of different layers within the brain’s cortex or tracing a tiny amount of a substance as it binds to a cellular receptor molecule.
The cyclotron will allow researchers to make greater use of an imaging technique called positron emission tomography, or PET, a key tool in understanding the molecular events behind disease. Because the radioisotopes used as tracers in PET studies decay so quickly, they must be implanted in subjects immediately, which has been impossible without a cyclotron on site.
The technique can be used to study the mechanisms at work in Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cerebrovascular disease, ischemic stroke and others diseases. “We’re trying to understand the molecular events behind all those diseases, and PET and a cyclotron are essential tools for doing that,” Lin said.
UNC will be one of the first five sites in the world to have another new generation imaging tool: an MR-PET scanner. The scanner can provide more complete information and save imaging time because it can collect anatomical information (via MR) and physiological information (via PET) at the same time.
The new building will also advance BRIC’s goal to become a central resource for researchers across North Carolina to make the acquisition, processing, analysis, storage and retrieval of images more standardized and systematic.
That capability could help researchers such as Dr. Elizabeth Bullitt, professor of neurosurgery in the School of Medicine, who develops methods to derive clinical benefit from what scientists know about changes and differences in blood vessels.
Bullitt examines brain blood vessels by using 3-dimensional brain scans. “We look at vessel number, vessel radius, and very importantly, vessel tortuosity – how wiggly vessels are. It looks like vessels become more wiggly in the presence of cancer, and this may be a way of helping to detect cancer. It may also be a way to assess whether a cancer is responding early to treatment,” Bullitt said.
Right now, the brain scans that Bullitt analyzes are acquired at many different hospitals, and her lab spends time ensuring that the scans are acquired at the correct size and resolution. But if BRIC could offer a standardized way of acquiring, processing and storing those images, that would streamline research such as hers.
Funding for the project was provided by the North Carolina General Assembly. Last year, legislators appropriated $8 million to pay for design and planning. This year, they appropriated another $35 million, with additional funding of $172 million for the 2009-2010 fiscal year and $45 million for 2010-2011.
North Carolina legislators who played key roles in the effort to secure this funding included Sen. Marc Basnight, who is the Senate’s president pro tem, and Rep. Joe Hackney, speaker of the house.
Construction of the facility should be complete by the end of 2012, said Bob Marriott, associate dean for resource analysis, planning and management in the School of Medicine. Upon completion, the Imaging Research Center will be the School of Medicine’s largest building, Marriott said.