Alonso Carrasco-Labra, D.D.S., M.Sc., Ph.D.

Professional Biography

A leading authority in evidence-based health care, Dr. Carrasco-Labra joined the School in October 2021 as an Associate Professor, tenure track, in the Department of Preventive & Restorative Sciences.

Prior to coming to Penn Dental Medicine, he served as Senior Director of the Department of Evidence Synthesis and Translation Research within the American Dental Association (ADA) Science and Research Institute and as Director of the ADA’s Center for Evidence-Based Dentistry.

He earned his DDS from the University of Chile and completed his PhD in health research methodology and a master’s in clinical epidemiology from McMaster University in Canada. Dr. Carrasco-Labra has an extensive portfolio as a widely published author, invited lecturer, and national and international consultant. He has served as clinical practice guideline and policy methodologist for the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO)/World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), as well as the governments and health care agencies in Saudi Arabia, Spain, Dominican Republic, UK, Canada, Colombia, Chile, and other ministries of health worldwide.

For many years, Dr. Carrasco-Labra has also been active in the Cochrane Collaboration, an independent global organization internationally recognized as the benchmark for high-quality information about the effectiveness of health care. Presently, he serves as the Director of the new Cochrane Oral Health Collaborating Center at Penn Dental Medicine.

In the realm of research, Dr. Carrasco-Labra is currently principal investigator of an FDA-funded grant titled “Evidence-based Clinical Practice Guideline for the Management of Acute Dental Pain: Development, Implementation, and Evaluation Using Data Analytics to Target an Implementation Strategy.”

Over his career, he has held faculty appointments and has been a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Chile; the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Toronto; the School of Dental Medicine, University of Buffalo; and the School of Dentistry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Honors/Credentials

• Certificate of Merit, Department of Oral health, Ministry of Health, Chile (2009)
• Ph.D. Program Excellence Award, McMaster University (2019)
• Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria, Washington, DC, United States. Appointment to represent the American Dental Association. (2019)
• IADR/AADR William J. Gies Award. Best clinical paper published in the Journal of Dental Research in 2019 (2020)
• IADR, Chilean Division Award, best oral presentation (Senior category) (2020)

Selected Publications

Education

• D.D.S. Faculty of Dentistry, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile (2006)
• M.Sc. Health Research Methodology – Clinical Epidemiology stream, Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics,
  McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada (2012)
• Ph.D. Health Research Methodology (approved with distinction) Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics,
  McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada (2020)