The former dean and “driving force” behind creation of the Kakaako campus for the University of Hawaii’s John A. Burns School of Medicine died Wednesday morning from the rare neurodegenerative disease that cut short his career in Hawaii six years ago.

Dr. Edwin C. Cadman, who left his post as chief of staff at Yale New Haven Hospital in 1999 to lead UH’s medical school, passed away in Corvallis, Ore., surrounded by family, the university announced in a statement released Thursday. He was 70.

Cadman arrived in Honolulu 16 years ago with a commitment to securing a new campus for the medical school and building a strong research program. He found a strong ally for those ideas in then-Gov. Ben Cayetano, who identified the Kakaako location where the medical school now stands.

“I took Dr. Cadman up to the tenth floor of the Gold Bond Building,” Cayetano said in the UH statement. “That’s where the Hawaii Community Development Corporation was. And I took him to the window, and I pointed down to the space toward the beach in Kakaako, and I said, ‘Doc’ – that’s what I called him – ‘Doc, that’s where your new medical school will be!’ He was overjoyed.”

According to UH, Cadman promised Cayetano that the new campus would be his “life’s last work,” unaware of how prophetic those words would be.

The medical school opened on the Kakaako campus in 2005 — the same year that Cadman was diagnosed with Primary Progressive Aphasia, a rare condition that progressively takes away patients’ ability to speak or articulate their thoughts in writing. It has no cure, and Cadman stepped down as dean that same year, retiring altogether four years later at a ceremony attended by some of the state’s most prominent elected officials and business and education leaders.

“As the driving force behind the creation of the new facilities in Kakaako, Dean Cadman envisioned a school that in only five years under his leadership would experience unprecedented growth in biomedical research,” Dr. Jerris Hedges, who succeeded Cadman as dean, said in the university release. “I was honored to follow his lead and to build on the contributions to the medical school that were made by him and others who came before him.”

Memorial service plans for Cadman haven’t yet been announced, but the Cadman family asks that those who want to make a donation in his honor do so by contributing to the University of Hawai’i Foundation’s Dr. Edwin C. Cadman Endowed Fund for the Study of Neurodegenerative Disorders.

Those who would like to share rememberances of Cadman are encouraged to do so on a special Facebook page that has been set up for that purpose.