5 Questions

1. What drew you to dental education (or dentistry)?

I came to dentistry indirectly. My training is in microbiology, and I first joined the Dental College of Georgia more than a decade ago, expecting to teach my students solely about microbes. What I found was a room full of future clinicians who would one day have to make real decisions about real patients, often with incomplete information, and that changed what I thought my job was.

That’s what has kept me here. Dental students are remarkably good at memorizing, but the clinic asks something harder of them: weigh evidence, question assumptions and know why they’re choosing what they choose. Helping students build that kind of thinking, starting in the basic sciences, has become the center of my work, and it’s why I can’t imagine teaching anywhere else.

2. What’s the best career advice you ever received?

Early in my career, I attended a workshop titled “Community in the Classroom,” where the facilitator reminded us that “students bring much more into the classroom than their notes.” Around the same time, I was encouraged to treat my teaching with the same curiosity I’d bring to research: notice what’s happening, ask why and adjust. Together, those two pieces of advice shaped how I teach.

When a student seems disengaged or a lesson falls flat, I try not to jump to conclusions. I get curious instead. Sometimes the answer is in my teaching, and I change something. Sometimes it’s in the student’s life, and what they need is patience or a conversation more than a lecture. Either way, curiosity has made me slower to judge and quicker to ask, and I think that’s made me a better teacher than any technique I’ve learned.

3. In 10 years, the biggest change about dental education (or dentistry) will be …

The biggest change will be that knowing the answer will matter less than knowing how to question it. AI will give students and clinicians instant answers: a diagnosis, a treatment plan, a summary of the literature. Much of that will be genuinely useful. But an answer delivered with confidence isn’t always correct, and the clinicians who serve patients best will be the ones who can ask, “How do you know? What’s the evidence? What might it be missing?”

That means dental education will need to shift from teaching students what to know toward teaching them how to think: how to weigh evidence, recognize uncertainty and use their own judgment alongside these tools rather than defer to them. And the part AI can’t do, such as sitting with an anxious patient and earning their trust, will become even more central to what makes a good dentist. In many ways, the future of dentistry will depend on how human we stay.

4. If you couldn’t be in dental education, what field would you have chosen for a career?

I would love to be in animal rescue. My house is already full of three shih tzus, four cats, a bearded dragon, three new rats and a terrarium of cockroaches. It would be wonderful to have some land and be able to rescue pigs, goats and anything else I could get my hands on that needed a safe and loving space to while away their days. There’s something uniquely rewarding about caring for an animal that can’t tell you when something is wrong. It requires love, patience, close observation and a lot of trust.

5. What’s your philosophy in 10 words or less?

Everyone has a story I can’t see.