He has served as interim director for the past 18 months, succeeding Roy Geib, Ph.D., who had directed the center since 1992.
Dr. Duong will lead the Terre Haute center as it expands from a two-year program to a four-year rural health medical education program designed to encourage young physicians to practice in underserved areas of the state. In the past year, the Terre Haute center also has increased its enrollment by 50 percent to help offset an anticipated shortage of doctors in Indiana and nationwide.
Since the statewide medical education system was established nearly 40 years ago, the Terre Haute center, like the other seven medical education centers in the state, have taught students for the first two years of medical school before they matriculated to Indianapolis for the final two years of their education and clinical rotations. The expansion plan to increase class size and the length of programs at the various medical education centers is to be phased in by 2012.
Dr. Duong’s research interests include the mechanisms of brain aging and associated disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. In 1992, he founded the Wabash Valley Neurological Research Bank to increase the available brain tissue resources for research in Indiana. That bank has gained support from a special population, the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, who approached him offering to donate brain tissue to his research.
Among Dr. Duong’s professional honors are several for excellence in teaching from IUSM-Terre Haute, the IU School of Medicine and the IU Board of Trustees, who have presented him with the Trustees Teaching Award for six consecutive years.
Dr. Duong completed graduate and postdoctoral studies in anatomy and neuroanatomy at UCLA and taught anatomy at Santa Monica (Calif.) College before joining the IU School of Medicine faculty in 1991. He also holds joint appointments in the Department of Biology at Indiana State University and in the Department of Applied Biology and Biomedical Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.