Evidence-Based Dentistry Leader Dr. Alonso Carrasco-Labra Joins Penn Dental Medicine
Philadelphia – Building upon the scope and depth of the School’s academics and scholarship, Penn Dental Medicine welcomes Dr. Alonso Carrasco-Labra to its faculty. A leading authority in evidence-based health care, Dr. Carrasco-Labra joined the School effective October 25. He will be appointed Associate Professor, tenure track, in the Department of Preventive & Restorative Sciences pending approval by the School’s personnel committees and the Provost’s Office.
“We are tremendously pleased to have Dr. Carrasco-Labra with us,” says Penn Dental Medicine’s Morton Amsterdam Dean, Dr. Mark S. Wolff. “He is one of the top global experts in evidence-based dentistry and evidence-informed health policy and will contribute greatly to expanding our leadership in these areas.”
Dr. Carrasco-Labra comes to Penn Dental Medicine from the American Dental Association (ADA), where he served as Senior Director of the Department of Evidence Synthesis and Translation Research within the ADA Science and Research Institute. Prior to that role, he was Director of 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/World Health Organization (PAHO), 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 on Cochrane’s Oral Health Group, the Wounds Group, the Patient Reported Outcome Methods Group, and the GRADEing Group.
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.
At Penn Dental Medicine, Dr. Carrasco-Labra will work as part of the School’s new Center for Integrative Global Oral Health (CIGOH), which launched earlier this year.