Thomas J. Balshi, DEN '72

When I came into Temple, Dean Hal was the dean at the time and he was so nice to me and so impressive that I said, “You know what? This is a place that warms my heart and I think I’ll do well here.”

In the late sixties and early seventies, it was the one building, the old Packard Car Manufacturing facility. I have to admit my favorite classes were in the area of restoring dentistry prosodontics in particular, and at the top of the list of favorite professors was my mentor, Ernie Mingledorff. Dr. Mingledorff was chairman of the Prosodontics Department at the time and he produced the first board of certified prosodontists in the state of Pennsylvania.

I started a dental laboratory when I was a freshman, and we would come back to the apartment where I had a room set up as a laboratory and produced gold castings and bridges and partial dentures and things like that for faculty members and fellow students.

Temple Dental School gave me something that just fills me with joy. We’re a teaching center. We do have the Dental students come out here, and what I see in those students in particular is this burning desire to excel; not just excel academically, but to excel emotionally and personally and excel in their ability to relate to the patients. We have this beautiful teaching center that we have Temple students coming out here for additional training, and we’ve been quite creative in our own right since graduation in developing protocols for new treatment methods, bringing computerization into the dental profession, bringing more engineering into the dental profession. We’re working with robotics now, and cat cam facilities and to do rapid prototyping of dental restorations. So, it’s an exciting time for dentistry.