« Back
Transforming the Future of Oral Health
Advances in engineering and computational tools are creating previously unimagined opportunities to accelerate oral health care innovation. This event will show how a new center uniting the schools of Dental Medicine and Engineering & Applied Sciences is making new discoveries, training future leaders at the intersection of sciences, and creating feasible solutions to address the unmet needs in oral health. From affordable chewing gum to help fight dental plaque and COVID-19 to low-cost nanotechnologies and devices to prevent tooth-decay and detect harmful bacteria and viruses such as SARS-CoV-2. We will share our vision and future possibilities to transform the future of oral health care and beyond through interdisciplinary research, training the next-generation of innovators, and entrepreneurship.
Date & Location
Date: 4/5/2022
Time: 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM
Hyun (Michel) Koo, DDS, MS, PhD
Co-director of the School’s Center for Innovation and Precision Dentistry; Professor in the Department of Orthodontics and Divisions of Pediatric Dentistry & Community Oral Health
Dr. Koo is a dentist-scientist trained in microbiology, cell biology, and food engineering who has dedicated his career to study and treat oral diseases by fostering inter-disciplinary collaborations and to train the next-generation talents to address unmet needs in oral health. He has published extensively in top-tier dental, biomedical, and multidisciplinary journals, including PNAS, Science, and Nature Reviews. He holds several US and international patents, and his h-index is 67. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the recipient of Distinguished Scientist and Innovation in Oral Care Awards from the International Association for Dental Research, and STAT nationwide finalist for Best Innovations in Science and Medicine. Dr. Koo is the founding director of the Center for Innovation & Precision Dentistry that bridges clinicians, scientists, and engineers for ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions to study, diagnose, and treat oral diseases. He is also the director of an NIH training program to train future leaders for careers at the interface of engineering and oral health sciences. His mission: promote innovative, multidisciplinary, and reproducible research that must be implemented for the good of patients as quickly as possible, while being impactful to other fields of medicine and engineering.