Dr. Sue Herring, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Department of Orthodontics
Dr. Sue Herring was trained at the University of Chicago (BS Zoology, 1967; PhD Anatomy, 1971). The UC Anatomy Department was focused on comparative and evolutionary anatomy, and Sue’s thesis dealt with the functional cranial anatomy of pigs and their relatives. Unfortunately, the department didn’t have equipment to study function, and there was no way to test her hypotheses about masticatory muscle activity patterns. The dental school at nearby University of Illinois at Chicago did have the equipment, though, and an NIH postdoctoral fellowship enabled her to study chewing and swallowing in minipigs (very cooperative subjects for feeding). The hypotheses were wrong, but pigs turned out to be excellent models for the human oral apparatus, leading to 35 years of almost continuous funding from NIH, mostly involving the effect of muscle function on cranial growth and adaptation. Notably, this interest overlaps strongly with the biology underlying orthodontic treatment. After a year as a postdoc, UIC hired her, and she remained there, rising to full professor, until moving to UW in 1990. She became the third basic scientist appointed to UW Orthodontics since the department’s inception in 1948, following Bert Krause and Ben Moffett. Sue is a Fellow of AAAS and AADOCR, a recipient of the IADR Craniofacial Biology Award and the Bruce Rothwell Lifetime Achievement Award, and the honoree of a symposium published online by the Journal of Morphology in 2024. She took emeritus status in 2020.
Dr. Linda LeResche, ScD, Professor Emeritus, Department of Oral Medicine
Linda LeResche is Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington (UW). Prior to her retirement, she was Professor of Oral Medicine, Adjunct Professor of Oral Health Sciences and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty at the UW School of Dentistry, as well as Affiliate Investigator at the Kaiser-Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. She holds a doctoral degree in comparative behavior from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in mental disorder epidemiology at the same institution.
Dr. LeResche conducted pain research at UW for over 30 years. Her early work focused on pain assessment, including facial expressions of pain and assessment and classification of temporomandibular disorders (TMD); she was instrumental in the development of the initial Research Diagnostic Criteria for TMD. She also studied the epidemiology of TMD and other pain problems in adults and adolescents, with a focus on gender differences in chronic pain and the role of hormonal factors in TMD.
Dr. LeResche has long-standing interest in research education. She served as Director of the UW School of Dentistry’s summer research fellowship (SURF) program from 1991-2010 and was co-director of the multidisciplinary pre-doctoral translational research training program (TL1) of the Institute of Translational Health Sciences from 2009-2021. Honors include the AADR Mentor of the Year Award (1998), Distinguished Senior Scientist of the IADR Neuroscience Group (2020), and the UW Distinguished Professor in Dentistry (2019-2021).