IU School of Dentistry gets OK for $21.6M expansion

The Indiana University School of Dentistry has received approval for a $21.6 million expansion of its clinical space at IUPUI.

The IU Board of Trustees gave unanimous approval to the 45,000-square-foot addition on Aug. 14, the school said in a press release. The addition is expected to open in 2020.

The 136-year-old school at 121 W. Michigan St., has been operating in facilities constructed in the 1930s, 1960s and 1970s, and is due for an upgrade.

“A state-of-the-art facility will enable the school to continue to attract the brightest students and highest-caliber faculty,” said Dr. Lloyd Hagedorn, who graduated from the school and chairs its alumni building executive committee. “This is a new chapter for IU dentistry, and the alumni are proud to be a part of it.”

The school has raised more than $4 million from alumni toward the construction project, which will be funded through dental school capital funds, auxiliary services revenue, indirect cost-recovery funds and gifts to the IU Foundation.

“We are ecstatic,” said Dr. John N. Williams, dean of the IU School of Dentistry. “This has been a vision for more than 20 years, and we are grateful to IU leadership and to our early alumni supporters who believed in the new building well before there was a tangible plan.”

The IU school is the only dental school in Indiana. More than 80 percent of the dentists in Indiana are alumni of the school.