Finding joy in North Dakota

Judy Bruce on the new scholarship endowment she established to honor her late husband and former Medical Laboratory Science chair Wayne Bruce.

“Just a side note – this is a love story.”

So began the former UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences (SMHS) faculty Judy Bruce as she launched into the story behind the new Dr. Albert Wayne and Julie Ann Bruce Endowment.

Widow of the late Wayne Bruce, the longtime chair of the School’s Department of Medical Laboratory Science, Judy established the endowment recently with the UND Alumni Association & Foundation to support the Department Wayne helped build.

From her home in Florida, Judy smiled as she recalled the story of how a long love affair resulted in a gift to what has become one of the largest and most innovative medical laboratory science programs in the nation.

“We always intended to leave something to the University of North Dakota,” said Judy, an Illinois native who went to college in Wisconsin. “It comes from wanting to give back to the MLS program at UND, particularly because Wayne spent so many years there and was so foundational in its development. I remember, while working there, we were always looking for money, either to repair equipment or travel to a seminar or something.”

Hopefully, Judy said, her and Wayne’s gift will help alleviate some of the burden current faculty and staff feel as they manage the Department in the future.

Love story

Named for Wayne and his daughter, who also works in healthcare in North Dakota, the endowment is unrestricted, Judy continued, meaning the Department is free to use it for “priority needs,” whatever those needs might be.

“I’m not from North Dakota originally, but my joy came from North Dakota,” Judy says. “I have great, heartfelt feelings for North Dakota. So we’re giving back.”

North Dakota is, after all, where she spent some of her happiest years.

Having met Wayne at an American Society for Medical Technology meeting in 1989, Judy, who was at the meeting representing America’s Rust Belt states relative to Wayne’s upper-Midwest group, was intrigued by the former farm kid Wayne’s presentation on a new distance learning program in North Dakota.

“He received a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop distance learning at UND,” she explained. “It was a big grant and he was looking for someone to coordinate it. I thought, ‘This sounds like an interesting job.’ So, I applied for it and was working in North Dakota by 1989.”

That job eventually led to a relationship, said Judy, that would last more than 30 years.

After managing the distance program for a time, Judy hopped over the Red River to serve as an associate dean at Northland Community & Technical College in East Grand Forks, Minn. She returned to UND in 1999, retiring in 2007 to follow Bruce up to Thunder Bay, Ontario, where he had taken the role of Associate Dean of Continuing Health Professional Education at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine.

Before Ontario, though Wayne helped “save” UND’s MLS program, say current and former SMHS faculty.

“Dr. Bruce had some great ideas,” noted longtime MLS faculty Mary Coleman of the former department chair. “He saved our program.”

As health providers and hospitals started to develop their own medical laboratories and train their own technologists in-house in the 1980s, UND’s training program saw a drop in enrollments.

So Wayne and his team needed to get creative.

The distance learning grant was just one of Wayne’s many ideas to boost enrollments at UND. Other ideas included the initiation of a postgraduate training partnership with Mayo Clinic and the forming of a Western College Alliance for Medical Laboratory Science (WCAMLS), which brought students from twelve midwestern colleges and universities to UND for training in MLS.

Each of these programs expanded the department’s scope, opening up avenues for students from across the region to become UND MLS students, even if they still lived in Rochester, Minn., Billings, Mont., or La Crosse, Wis.

Giving back

“So he developed all that, and you get the sense of him always wanting to provide for his state,” Judy continued. “That’s the real thing about his vision: he was always trying to give back.”

All of this, concluded Judy, is what drew her to Wayne: the generosity of his mind.

“He found creative ways to generate dollars – he was very good at that,” she smiled. “There’s a saying that creative minds are never very neat. And he had a creative mind. That’s part of his legacy for UND. He didn’t let things get in his way. He was very dedicated.”

Admitting her bias, Judy said she found Wayne, who passed in 2023, to be so smart and so creative that she couldn’t help wanting to be near him.

“I found a quote from a letter Wayne wrote about his career in lab science,” Judy explained, pulling out a paper note. “He wrote, ‘I have an infectious passion for educational technology and the utilization of multiple modes of delivery.’ This pretty much sums up the distance learning programs he created with a supportive team of professionals in UND MLS.”

And she’s hoping the Dr. Albert Wayne and Julie Ann Bruce Endowment will continue to help today’s supportive team of MLS professionals for many years to come.