Description of the video:

Dear IUSD family, I’m Gabriel Chu, the associate dean for research. it is my great pleasure to speak to you virtually on this research day. First, I would like to thank Dr. Hamada and his team for their innovation and persistence for this IUSD research day activity during the COVID 19 stay at home order. I can say that they took upon themselves a lot of coordination behind the scene to make it happen. I also want to thank Dean Murdock-Kinch for her vision for research and for providing tremendous support that we can carry on this tradition. I am so proud to see that IUSD as a whole continue to thrive even under these challenging circumstances. Indeed, we are thriving in our research endeavor. With a set goal to enhance our research, we have engaged in recruiting new research faculties and supporting faculty research activities in the past few years. With our conscious efforts, we start to see our faculty receiving more federal grants. For example, NIDCR, the national Institute of dental and craniofacial research each year publish the ranking of the funding they distributed to dental schools nationwide. In the fiscal year of 2018 and 19, IUSD has reach the highest ranking we have had in ten years on the list. There are still a lot of rooms to improve, but I am proud that we are moving in a very positive trajectory to our goal of enhancing federally funded research at IUSD. Parallel to that, we continue to see our student engaging in high-quality student research projects. An example will be from our Class 2022 dental student Ashley Karczewski. She was awarded a prestigious  Fogarty Fellowship from NIH and have spent several months in Kenya to study periodontal disease in HIV+ adolescents. She has just now been elected the vice president of AADR National Student Research Group before she flew back to Indiana from Kenya due to the pandemic.  Beyond that, I’m also very impressed by the depth and the width of the many research projects that I have reviewed from this years’ research day submissions. I believe you agree with me in a moment when you have the chance to listen to some of the presentations from your peer students. My sincere hope is that you will carry on that spirit of inquiry no matter where you go and in whichever career path you take, be it in academic or in private practice. Before we do that, I would like you to have the opportunity to listen to two of our faculty who had just received new NIH grants in this past year about the research. Do keep in mind that, they were once a regular dental student just like many of you. I hope you will be inspired by how they take that desire of inquiry and continue to pursue new knowledge to advance our dental profession.