College of Dentistry and Dental Clinics

For 34 years, Dr. Ana Diaz-Arnold (’84 G.P.R., ’87 M.S.) has been a fixture in the Department of Family Dentistry, teaching countless fourth-year dental students, mentoring and working alongside adjunct faculty, and treating her own patients, and as she retires in June 2022, her impact on the college and the dental profession in Iowa will remain long afterward.

An accomplished oral surgeon, Kim Swanson (’81 BA, ’86 DDS) is a dedicated alumna who has left a mark in the field of oral and maxillofacial surgery and in the dental profession more widely.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded Matthew Remy, a PhD student in Biomedical Engineering, a F31 grant to support his dissertation project, “Bone Regeneration Induced by the Sustained Release of Osteoinductive microRNAs from 3D-printed Constructs.”

As the course director for the fourth-year Dental Emergency Course, Alberto Gasparoni exemplifies the characteristic features embodied in the James H. and Hermine E. McLeran Faculty Award and the namesakes for the award—a passionate commitment to dental education focused on excellence in teaching and patient-centered care.

The Delta Dental of Iowa Foundation awarded Dr. Leonardo Marchini a grant to support the final step in the development of a tool to measure the degree of ageism among dental students. The tool will be used to develop and evaluate specific strategies for addressing ageism among dental students with the goal of improving the oral health of older adults.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) awarded Cristina Vidal, assistant professor in the Department of Operative Dentistry, a 5-year grant totaling over $700K for her research project studying the relationship between caries and the oral microbiome.

The BigMouth Dental Data Repository is a comprehensive database of electronic health records provided by dental schools in a partially de-identified manner. Eleven major dental schools are currently participating with Iowa joining in 2020. This repository can be used for high-powered research using information collected from each of the participating institutions, and is a promising avenue for big data research.

In 2020, the University of Iowa was ranked 10th in the country for the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) funding, and 2nd in the Big 10, with over $6.4M in funds awarded.

Dr. Sukirth Ganesan, assistant professor in periodontics, and a team of researchers in the Carver College of Medicine were awarded a Carver Trust COVID-19 Pilot Collaborative Award. The grant, Unraveling the role of saliva in COVID- 19 pathogenesis using a comprehensive multi-omics approach, will involve a multi-arm, cross-sectional, case-control study with an integrated -omics approach to determine the microbial, metabolic, functional, and immune alterations in the saliva of COVID-19 patients.

Researchers at the University of Iowa College of Dentistry are working to make bone regeneration a reality through novel tissue engineering strategies and cutting-edge science. Hongli Sun is one of several faculty members at the college leading the charge to develop novel bone regeneration strategies for particular conditions and diseases.