Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine is now home to the Richardson Collection, a landmark study of longitudinal growth in 98 African-American children conducted by Elisha R. Richardson, BS, DDS, MS, PhD. The collection, including radiographs and dental casts, was entrusted to CWRU by Dr. Richardson’s family after his passing to ensure its preservation and accessibility for future generations of researchers.
The Richardson Collection is housed in the Bolton-Brush Growth Study Center, located on the third floor of the Dental Research Building. The center is best known as the home of the Bolton and Brush longitudinal growth collections, which date back to the 1930s and were based primarily on Caucasian subjects. In parallel to those studies, Dr. Richardson followed many of the same research protocols—collecting semi-annual or annual radiographs of children from age six through their mid-teens without orthodontic intervention.
A pioneering figure in addressing the significant absence of African American normative craniofacial growth data, Dr. Richardson authored the Atlas of Craniofacial Growth in Americans of African Descent, published by the University of Michigan in 1991. The atlas remains a foundational reference for clinicians and researchers across the country.
“This collection has been lost to the orthodontic community since the turn of the century,” said Mark Hans, DDS, MSD (DEN '79, '81), chair of the Department of Orthodontics. “CWRU has now taken steps to preserve it and make it available to the local dental community. This is the best control data we have for African American subjects. Once we have the resources to scan the data into an online format, it can be made available worldwide.”
A team of CWRU students, including Lucas Munn, Amanda Ngo, Thy Nguyen and Niels Sondergaard, and as well as Bridget Camarillo from Ohio State University, have been working to digitize parts of both the Bolton and Richardson collections. Ngo, a CWRU neuroscience and predental student, will use data from both studies for her senior project, “Cephalometric Analysis Across Populations: Linking Craniofacial Growth to Neurodevelopment.” Ngo says, “I am grateful for the opportunity to work with this important data, take something old and make it mean something new again.”
The Richardson Family selected CWRU as the permanent home for the collection in recognition of the professional bond between Dr. Richardson and Dean Kenneth Chance, DDS (DEN '79). Dean Chance succeeded Dr. Richardson as dean of Meharry Medical College School of Dentistry, making the gift both a scholarly contribution and a personal tribute.