The School of Dentistry has announced that Dr. Russell Deal has been named the 2020-21 David H. Wands Fellow in Graduate Prosthodontics. Dr. Deal, who received his DDS from the school in 2019, is now a first-year resident in the school’s Graduate Prosthodontics program.
He becomes the school’s 13th Wands Fellow and the first UW DDS alumnus to receive the fellowship since Dr. Josh Manchester, who earned his DDS in 2013 and was the 2015-16 Wands Fellow.
Dr. Deal entered the School of Dentistry after receiving his undergraduate degree in chemistry in 2015 at St. Martin’s University in Lacey, Wash. Before college, he worked for six summers as a day program volunteer with the Association for Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities of Tri-Cities, supervising children and adults with developmental disabilities. He also volunteered with the Special Olympics from 2007 to 2011.
His childhood included an adventurous year and a half when the family moved to Ukraine in 1999. His father worked for a U.S. national laboratory assisting with the cleanup effort at Chernobyl after the nuclear reactor accident there. He and his brothers attended school in Slavutych, a city built expressly for the evacuated personnel of the Chernobyl power plant.
As a dental student, he volunteered for the Health and Homelessness student outreach, providing dental exams, fillings, and extractions in Mount Vernon, Wash. He was also a peer mentor in an Operative Dentistry course.
An accident at age 12 that fractured both central incisors may have been the impetus for a dental career. “I spent quite a bit of time at my family dentist and was incredibly pleased that my family dentist could fix my smile,” he said. “This artistic side to dentistry really sparked the beginning of my interest.”
Dr. Wands, who taught at the school in what was formerly the Department of Prosthodontics for 22 years, established the fellowship at the University of Maryland, where he received his DDS with honors in 1967 from the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery. He re-launched the fellowship at the UW in 1998.
Dr. Wands practiced for seven years with the U.S. Public Health Service and later completed a graduate prosthodontics residency at the UW before joining the dental faculty. He taught both undergraduate and graduate prosthodontics, achieving the rank of Clinical Professor. Now retired from private practice, he is a life member of the Academy of Prosthodontics and Pacific Coast Society for Prosthodontics.