Acknowledgments

Abstract

We would like to express our appreciation to those who supported the work on this report in addition to those included in the list of contributors. We benefited from the contributions of our colleagues, Dr. Ian Coulter, who was a co-investigator, and Dr. Sebastian Baumeister, a visiting international scholar in early phases of the Pipeline program evaluation. The work of our research assistants was essential to the completion of this report, and we are grateful to Heidi Ambrosio, Hamilton Chen, Vanessa Garcia, Jeremy Jacquot, Tram Le, Charles Mata, Marissa Opilas, Shirin Shahedi, and Sophia Young. The evaluation was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Grant #045592 and The California Endowment (TCE) Grant #20031951. We are especially appreciative of the support of RWJF to publish and disseminate this report (Grant #58942). For their encouragement and valuable advice during the early stages of the evaluation, we would like to thank our initial project officers, Mary Ann Scheirer and Diane Manuel with RWJF and TCE, respectively, as well as Laura Leviton, our RWJF project officer who advised us for most of the project period. We are indebted to Richard Weaver from the American Dental Education Association (ADEA) and Tom Berger from the American Dental Association (ADA) for sharing their data that was so essential to our evaluation. Thank you to Richard W. Valachovic, ADEA Executive Director, and Merideth Menken, ADEA Senior Director of Publications, for publishing and distributing the report and to the staff of the Journal of Dental Education—Olav Alvares, Editor, Lynn Page Whittaker, Managing Editor, and Judy Myers, Graphic Designer—for producing a quality product. Finally, credit should be given to the Pipeline National Program Office staff and the fifteen Pipeline dental schools and their principal investigators, faculty, and staff for accommodating our endless requests for data and information. We are also appreciative of the principal investigators and their colleagues from the schools who wrote the responses to the Pipeline program and its evaluation that are provided at the end of each case study.