Lasting Impressions | Summer 2016

NSU COLLEGE OF DENTAL MEDICINE x 19 Universidad Santa Tomas, Bucaramanga, Colombia; Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Peru; or Universitat Internacional de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. Teaching What Matters While Uchin is proud of his dental specialty, he said that, out of approximately 190,000 dentists in the United States, only 20 percent are specialists. “We teach dentistry, but we also teach our students that practicing dentistry isn’t done in an isolated environment, and that the health professions are interrelated to one another. We’re also the first dental college established in partnership with a college of osteopathic medicine to offer a combined program leading to a dual D.O. and D.M.D. degree.” Teaching dentists how to treat the whole person was also a focus through- out the growing years of the CDM. “From the beginning, we put emphasis on treating special-needs populations. We challenged students and immediately placed them in an environment where they had to treat populations with physical and mental disabilities.” Career in Dentistry For Uchin, dentistry came naturally, because his father was a dentist. He didn’t even consider another career choice. “I have to assume that’s how I became interested in it,” he said. “My father never pushed it. In fact, he tried harder for me to become a physician.” What interested Uchin most was the “artistic side of dentistry.” He loved carpentry work and building models with his hands. “I liked the independence of dentistry, which is more self-reliant than medicine,” he said. His children, however, didn’t follow in his foot- steps, although his daughter, Carol, did become a dental hygienist and is a CDM staff member. “I encouraged them to go into the field,” he admitted. “I hounded Carol and said, ‘Why are you going to hygiene school? Go two more years and be a dentist.’ ” His oldest son, Andrew, is a photographic artist who manages the museum store at the Norton Simon Museum in Los Angeles, Califor- nia. Middle son, Richard, passed away at the age of 33 from complications from Crohn’s disease. “That was when no one knew what to do about managing Crohn’s,” Uchin said. Not one to slow down, Uchin is looking forward to enjoying more leisure time with this wife. “Marlene was my child- hood sweetheart,” he said. “We started going steady when we were 15, when she lived around the corner from me in Philadelphia.” He and Marlene plan to spend more time at the Vermont summer home they share with their daughter and her husband, Steve Alterman. “I’ll fish a little, and maybe I’ll take up something else,” he said. There’s a clue that he won’t retire entirely, since he will be providing occasional lectures to dental stu- dents on money management as part of their practice management course. “I will teach on occasion,” he revealed. “I spend most of the time now with graduate students in the Department of Endodontics, and it’s very rewarding.” ◆ A portrait of Robert Uchin will still grace the halls of the CDM.