2023 Highlights
- In 2023, The Center for Integrative Global Oral Health (CIGOH)collaborated with Fundación ADM, Institución de Asistencia Privada to present the Global Oral Health Forum 2023, which took place in March 2023 in Merida, Mexico. The main goal of this two-day gathering was to encourage and facilitate a dialogue between major stakeholders in the global oral health community. The two-day program included sessions on equity and disabilities, the United Nations Sustainable development goals and universal health coverage, research and education, and public health initiatives and workforce. This was the inaugural international conference presented by CIGOH, Penn Dental Medicine’s policy center that launched in 2021. Read more »
- Members of the Penn Dental Medicine community gathered in September 2023 with the global dental community at the FDI World Dental Congress (FDIWDC23) in Sydney, Australia with Dean Mark Wolff and faculty members Dr. Markus Blatz, Dr. William Cheung (D’81, GD’82), and Dr. Stefani Cheung (C’08, D’11) presenting as part of the scientific program. Read more »
- Penn Dental Medicine’s Morton Amsterdam Dean, Dr. Mark S. Wolff, and Dr. Julian Fisher, Director of Oral and Planetary Health Policies within the Center for Integrative Global Oral Health, were among an international group of experts participating in the launch of a World Health Organization (WHO) publication focused on the social determinants of health and health equity. The webinar was broadcast live online from WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland in November 2023, showcasing the key aspects of the publication, “Integrating the Social Determinants of Health into Health Workforce Education and Training.” Read more »
- Penn Dental Medicine joined in global discussions on sustainability and the impact of climate change on human and oral health, delivering a satellite event as part of COP28, a United Nations climate change conference held Nov. 30 – Dec. 12, 2023 in Dubai. Penn Dental Medicine’s Morton Amsterdam Dean, Dr. Mark Wolff, and Dr. Michael Glick, Executive Director of the School’s Center for Integrative Global Oral Health, were among a panel of speakers who discussed oral healthcare and education topics through the lens of climate change and planetary health. Dr. Julian Fisher, Director of Oral and Planetary Health Policies within CIGOH, moderated the web-based panel discussion, which in addition to Drs. Wolff and Glick, included faculty from dental schools in Colombia, Germany, Zimbabwe, England, India, and Nigeria, along with the Dental Officer in the Prevention of Noncommunicable Diseases department of the World Health Organization (WHO). Read more »
- Penn Dental Medicine continued to build upon its international engagement with the signing of a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The signing took place as part of a recent visit by Penn Dental Medicine’s Morton Amsterdam Dean, Dr. Mark S. Wolff, to South Africa and Tanzania. Read more »
- In 2023, Penn Dental Medicine’s Center for Integrative Global Oral Health (CIGOH) partnered with Cochrane Oral Health to form the Cochrane Oral Health Collaborating Center at Penn Dental Medicine, the first oral-health-oriented Cochrane collaborative group in the world. The new Center marks a significant step in helping to expand evidence-based knowledge to inform practice and oral health policy worldwide. Cochrane Oral Health, headquartered at The University of Manchester in the UK, is one of the groups within Cochrane, a global independent not-for-profit network that produces systematic reviews across all areas of medicine. Cochrane has more than 37,000 contributors from over 190 countries working together to produce up-to-date, accessible health information that is free from commercial sponsorship and other conflicts of interest to help inform decisions about health care. Since its inception, Cochrane has defined the methodological standards for conducting systematic reviews around the world. Read more »
- Two Penn Dental Medicine faculty members — Dr. George Hajishengallis, Thomas W. Evans Centennial Professor in the Department of Basic & Translational Sciences, and Dr. Michel Koo, Professor in the Department of Orthodontics and Divisions of Community Oral Health and Pediatric Dentistry, were recognized for the scope and depth of their research — named on the Highly Cited Researchers™ 2023 list from Clarivate. The annual list identifies researchers who demonstrated significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. Read more »
- Penn Dental Medicine researchers from the School’s Center for Integrative Global Oral Health — Dr. Alonso Carrasco-Labra (co-primary investigator) and Olivia Urquhart — collaborated with a team of evidence-synthesis and guideline methodologists from the American Dental Association Science and Research Institute, McMaster University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Art of Democracy to develop guidelines for managing acute dental pain in children.
- The Center for Innovation & Precision Dentistry (CiPD) and Penn Health-Tech awarded their second annual IDEA (Innovation in Dental Medicine and Engineering to Advance Oral Health) Prize, a highly selective competition to support a dental and engineering collaboration to address unmet needs in oral and craniofacial health. The 2023 recipients were Kyle Vining, Assistant Professor of Preventive & Restorative Sciences at Penn Dental Medicine, who also has a joint appointment at Penn Engineering, and Dr. Michael Mitchell, Associate Professor of Bioengineering at Penn Engineering. Through their collaborative research, they are aiming to develop next-generation treatments for dental caries (tooth-decay) using lipid nanoparticles, the same delivery vehicles employed in the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine technology. Read more »
- Yu Zhang, Professor in the Department of Preventive & Restorative Sciences, has been recognized for his research and innovation by the International Association for Dental Research (IADR), receiving the 2023 IADR DMG Peyton-Skinner Award. This annual award, presented by the IADR Dental Materials Group (DMG), honors scientists who throughout their careers have made outstanding contributions to innovation in dental materials. With a background in physics and material science, Dr. Zhang has become a highly respected researcher in the area of dental ceramics, with a focus on zirconia. Read more »
- Adding to the scope and depth of its Advanced Graduate Degree programs, Penn Dental Medicine launched a new Master of Science in Oral & Population Health (MOPH), welcoming its first cohort of students in the fall of 2023. An online program (synchronous and asynchronous), the MOPH covers a diversity of disciplines in creating, synthesizing, and disseminating evidence to inform clinical practice and policies at all levels of the healthcare system and the research enterprise. Read more »
- Penn Dental Medicine’s Center for Integrative Global Oral Health (CIGOH) launched “Statistics with Crayons”, an animated video and podcast series aimed at making complex statistical concepts accessible to the general public. Read more »
- Adding to the depth and diversity of its dual-degree programs for DMD students, Penn Dental Medicine announced a new dual-degree with Penn Nursing in 2023, enabling interested and qualified students to earn a Master of Science in Nutrition Science (MSNS)along with their DMD. This new offering brings the total number of dual-degree options to nine, including six funded programs and three self-funded. The MSNS is a unique asynchronous online format consisting of 10 courses and a capstone project.
- Penn Dental Medicine faculty explore some of the latest advances in the field of dental medicine in a new course that launched in 2023 on Coursera, the global online learning platform. The course, Frontiers in Dentistry, focuses on five distinct areas that have gone through significant transformation recently and the therapeutic and scientific innovations in each moving oral health care delivery forward.