Dr. Corby is an Associate Professor of Oral Medicine and the Associate Dean of Translational Research at Penn Dental Medicine. She is also the Director of the Penn Dental Medicine Center for Clinical and Translational Research. After receiving her DDS and completing her residency in Periodontics and Implants, she went on to obtain her MS in Biomedical Informatics from the University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine. Dr. Corby also completed a postdoctoral training in Molecular Biology and Microbial Genetics at Harvard University and the Forsyth Institute. She has served as Principal Investigator, Co-Investigator, or Consultant on a number of industry, foundation, and NIH-funded projects. She is an experienced clinical trialist with over 20 years of experience designing and running high-impact clinical research projects.
As a periodontist, Dr. Corby’s major research interests are on the importance of “medical and dental integration.” Her focus is on the value of integrating medical and dental services in different healthcare and public health settings to prevent systemic complications of populations with unmet oral health needs and associated chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and oropharyngeal cancer.
Dr. Corby’s current research is in supportive cancer care through the prevention and management of the symptoms and side effects of cancer and its treatment. This includes the identification of specific factors (oral health, innate immune response, microbiome crosstalk, genomics) which contribute to oral manifestations and the development of personalized oral care interventions to prevent and manage regimen-related toxicities. One of her current research projects is a large clinical trial to test the impact of oral health on reducing oral mucositis in patients receiving radiation for head and neck cancer. She has implemented an interdisciplinary program in collaboration with Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, Department of Radiation Oncology for this project, which is funded by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research.