The School of Medicine’s Dermatology Department celebrated its 50th anniversary with a brunch and evening gala event Saturday.
Former and current dermatology faculty and former students in the program were all invited to the gala.
Kari Martin, assistant professor of dermatology and pediatrics and a former resident of the program, said she was excited to welcome back the participants of the program.
“The residency program has been in existence for 50 years, so it’s celebrating all the people this program has trained and sent out all over the country to do dermatology,” Martin said.
Dermatology Department chairwoman Karen Edison said about 130 people attended the celebration.
Some of the guests included Los Angeles-based dermatologist David Woodley; Will Eaglstein, former chairman at Miami University; and Larry Millikan, who is a professor emeritus at Tulane University.
“We’ve (had) people from every decade, and quite a few people from the first decade,” Edison said.
For Martin, that is the most exciting part of the anniversary celebration.
“I’ve heard stories about the people before me and a lot of those people that have trained with the program are going to be back at the gala, so it’ll be neat to put faces with those names and meet all those people that have been the history of the department and set up all the great training I had,” Martin said.
The theme of the gala was “honoring our past, securing our future,” according to the MU Dermatology website.
“The most exciting thing is to take a pause and really honor what has been done and honor our past,” Edison said. “This gives us an opportunity to do that, but it will also give us an opportunity to reflect on and plan to secure our future.”
The division was founded in 1960 by Norman Asel as a part of the School of Medicine. In 1963, Philip Anderson joined the division as the director of the now-famous residence program.
The program was initially made up of a small faculty, but even from the beginning it made an impact.
“In the early years, we were a very strong clinical and educational residency program and the focus was primarily on clinical services and education,” Edison said.
She said the program started with only one clinic location and eight resident leaders, and has since expanded to over six locations throughout mid-Missouri.
“Some of these locations include the Ellis Fischel Cancer Center, the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans Hospital, the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, Woodrail Clinic, and Jefferson City Dermatology,” Edison said.
She said the residency program has also increased the number of people that supervise the program from eight to nine in 2008.
The residence program takes three years to complete. Edison said the participants of the program are medical doctors who have already done internships and are now doing dermatology training.
Only a few students can enter the highly selective program each year.
“We get about 400 applications every year, and we take 3 residents every year,” Edison said. “We have trained 124 residents so far.”
Martin said she hopes the program could accommodate more residents in the future.
“I help with the training of future dermatologists,” she said. “That’s my real passion, so it’s really exciting to think about everywhere we can go, not just as a department, but all the neat things we can do educationally. We’re hoping to increase over time to four residents every year.”
The Dermatology Department is also developing new technologies.
“It’s been changing a lot already, the more we can stay on the forefront of that and keep up with technology the better,” Martin said.
One of the main aspects of this is through teledermatology, Edison said.
Teledermatology is defined by the American Academy of Dermatology as “the remote delivery of dermatologic services and clinical information using telecommunications technology.”
“We’ve always been on the cutting edge of teledermatology, but now we’re getting into more online teledermatology,” Edison said.
The Dermatology Division became a department in 2003, allowing the faculty to create their own laboratory, use electronic medical records and train expert derma-oncologists.
Edison said she hopes to expand the department’s fellowship programs, as well.