The State of HSDM

One hundred forty-three years old and still going strong. That was the message from Dean Bruce Donoff regarding the Harvard School of Dental Medicine during his State of the School address on May 28. With a vision of setting the standard and defining the future of dental education, practice and research, HSDM is moving forward with a new global oral health initiative, a focus on translational research and continual refinements to its curriculum. “Our work involves putting science into practice,” said Donoff.

Members of the HSDM community gathered in the Research and Education Building auditorium to hear the dean reflect on the School’s past as well as look to its future. He began with the School’s history of firsts, including being the first university-based dental school in the country and the first dental school to accept, and then graduate, an African American—Robert T. Freeman, the son of former slaves, who earned his DMD in 1869.

Donoff then touched on some highlights of the School’s last two decades, including the curriculum change from a five-year program to a four-year, problem-based-learning program, which began in 1993; opening of the Harvard Dental Center, also in 1993; construction of the new Research and Education Building, which opened in 2005; and the new, state-of-the-art teaching laboratory, which opened this April. Other changes include dramatic increases in scholarship funds disbursed and in sponsored research funds received from 1991 to the present.

Harvard’s contemporary role, said Donoff, is setting an example for the future. Indeed, HSDM continues to produce leaders on both the national and international levels. Nationally, Donoff noted, 35 percent of dental graduates pursue advanced education; at HSDM that number is 97 percent. Nationally, fewer than 1 percent of graduates enter the academy or public service; at HSDM this number is more than 60 percent.

HSDM has produced a disproportionately high number of dental educators, academic department heads and senior educational administrators nationwide. Some 20 percent of the deans at U.S. dental schools are alumni of HSDM’s DMD or graduate programs. In addition, the current executive directors of the American Dental Education Association and the American/International Association for Dental Research are HSDM alumni, as are the vice president for clinical education at Dentsply International, dental service directors at community health centers, and the editors in chief of the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery and Oral Medicine, Oral Pathology and Oral Surgery.

HSDM’s initiatives for the near future continue to be guided by the HSDM Strategic Plan of 2008– 2013, which calls for the School to:

• invest in clinical and translational research;
• recruit and develop faculty and staff;
• refine the curriculum to produce clinicianscholars;
• cultivate strategic relationships and enhance communication; and
• achieve financial stability and improve financial performance.

Some critical factors affecting the future of the field include the aging U.S. population, the growing awareness of connections between oral and systemic disease, the opening of several new dental schools across the country with limited research capacity or interest and the nationwide shortage of dental school faculty.

Donoff closed his address by discussing one of HSDM’s major new areas of focus: global oral health. Given the huge disease burden around the world and the fact that the Harvard Initiative on Global Health does not currently include an oral health component, HSDM has created a global oral health initiative designed to be integrated with Harvard-wide global health activities. Goals and objectives for HSDM’s global oral health initiative include facilitating HSDM research, in collaboration with scientists across Harvard and with partner institutions and organizations globally, to expand the knowledge base related to global health; establishing and continuing to enrich HSDM curricula to address global health; and establishing and sustaining leadership training for service, health administration and public policy related to global health.