The recently renovated Jan and Don O’Dowd Hall opened its gates on July 11 and welcomed the newly appointed dean of the school of medicine. Oakland University President Ora Hirsch Pescovitz inaugurated the building and introduced Dr. Christopher Carpenter with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Faculty, staff and special guests toured the northeast side of O’Dowd Hall to experience the renewal of the medical building and congratulate Carpenter for his new position within the Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine (OUWB).
“The engaging gateway entrance that you see here makes a wonderful first impression and it also makes a statement,” Pescovitz said. “It tells you that you’ve arrived at one of the best medical schools in the nation.”
“When you walked into this building before, it’s like you were walking into somebody’s basement,” Vice Dean for Business Administration Steve Collard said. “You immediately had a wall with a fire extinguisher — it was not greeting.”
The 5,000 square feet renovation included 10 mid-size classrooms, study spaces and kitchen amenities. Other additions were five study rooms, a private wellness/lactation room and two unisex restrooms.
“We have 250 (medical) students on campus plus 250 at Corewell who are often back here, so 500 students. We had basically 14 study rooms for them,” Collard said.
To resolve the study space shortage, 10 14-seat seminar rooms and 75 seating fixtures populate the renovated corridor of O’Dowd Hall.
The $9.7 million renovation was conducted by Fischbeck and overseen by Collard. OUWB’s cash-on-hand funds covered the expenditure, thus tuition costs did not increase to cover the project.
First approved in June 2022, the project resulted from the latest OUWB reaccreditation by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME). The LCME identified the need for renovations corresponding to unsatisfactory classroom and small group study spaces.
The renovation was also part of the OUWB 2022-2025 strategic plan to meet the long-term needs of the medical school.
“We grew pretty quickly as a medical school and then learned that the facility itself needed some adjustments to really enable our students better,” Carpenter said.
Improvements to curriculum, strengthening of graduate programs and collaboration with other OU departments were among the strategies implemented to address the regional physician shortage.
“As interim dean, Dr. Carpenter demonstrated an incisive grasp of the many key issues students and faculty in medical education are facing,” Pescovitz said.
Carpenter’s experience with Corewell Health’s executive leadership team, research on COVID-19 vaccines’ cost-effectiveness and more than 20 years in the medical field gave him the skills needed to be appointed dean, Pescovitz explained.
“Dr. Carpenter served on many state and national committees, including the FDA, both for the Antimicrobial Drugs Advisory Committee and the FDA Medical Devices Panel,” Pescovitz said. “He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.”
With the culmination of the OUWB 2022-2025 strategic plan and more projects to renovate medical school facilities, Carpenter explained the beginning of the next long-term plan.
“We need to do a curriculum review, make sure we’re keeping up with things like artificial intelligence, and seeing how that works in healthcare,” Carpenter said. “Also, review some other technologies and styles of learning that can help our students be more successful.”
“I’m excited to continue to serve now as the permanent dean of the medical school,” Carpenter said. “I am hopeful that we’re going to continue to grow and extend, to really help our community specifically in terms of helping develop and train students to become physicians and then come back and serve in our communities.”
