The dental school has a long history of promoting international relationships. When I graduated in 1985, faculty members Walter Hall and Don Strub encouraged me to apply for a position at the dental polyclinic of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois in Lausanne, Switzerland, where I would follow a string of Pacific grads, including Drs. Woody Isch â84, Bill Dorfman â83, Karin Hansen â83 and Paul Griffith â82, into the pale green corridors of the Service Odonto-stomatologique. In 1987 the school brought its cross-cultural proclivities home when it inaugurated the International Dental Studies (IDS) program, enabling foreign-trained dentists to earn a DDS degree in the U.S. The Dugoni School of Dentistryâs international orientation went from program to policy with the development of its 2007 Strategic Plan, which identified as a key directional goal âto become an international leader in educational innovation and professional development.â
[pullquote]Yet even in their nascent stages, Dugoni School of Dentistryâs international initiatives have already yielded significant fruit. âWeâre interested in these relationships because both sides grow,â says Nadershahi.[/pullquote]
A clutch of congruent interests moved the school to that intercontinental tipping point. Pacificâs main campus in Stockton, launching its own University-wide international initiative, the Global Project of Professional Development, supported the dental school taking a central role in world outreach projects. The dental schoolâs strategic planning committees realized that transborder connections would neatly serve all seven of the schoolâs declared core valuesâhumanism, innovation, leadership, reflection, stewardship, collaboration and philanthropy. Dean Patrick J. Ferrillo, Jr. brought with him a strong interest in the international cross-pollination of ideas. (In 2009, for instance, Ferrillo gave a presentation in Rio de Janeiro, âLeading Global Change in Undergraduate and Postgraduate Cariology Education,â at a conference initiating an ambitious 10-year enterprise called the Global Caries Initiative.) And a new generation of dental students, eager to make improvements in the world, was itching to organize trips to developing countries, and students in fact were already making them on their own to places like Guatemala, Peru and the Philippines. âThe world has flattened,â says Ferrillo, âand we have the kind of motivated, far-seeing people at the Dugoni School of Dentistry who feel an obligation to share and then go out looking for opportunities. They continuously want to do more.â
As a result, the dental school is now engaged in a number of collaborative educational projects around the world, from the Pacific Rim to the Middle East. One strong sign of the dental schoolâs commitment was its agreement in 2009 to house the International Federation of Dental Educators and Associations (IFDEA), a 15-year-old organization of several hundred dental schools worldwide previously operated through the American Dental Education Association (ADEA). Ferrillo, who is currently IFDEA president, named Dr. Anders Nattestad, professor of oral and maxillofacial surgery and director of global initiatives at the dental school, as IFDEA executive director. IFDEAâs presence at Pacific also helps facilitate school-sponsored leadership programs for international faculty and administrators. Dental school representatives, including Drs. Ferrillo and Nattestad, Executive Associate Dean Nader Nadershahi â94, IFDEA vice president, and Foundation Board Member and past Alumni Association President Colin Wong, traveled to China in 2009 to sign a collaborative agreement to develop student and faculty exchanges with the School and Hospital of Stomatology at Wenzhou Medical College, which had already previously sent representatives to the Dugoni School of Dentistry several times. Their visit to China also included meetings and lectures at the Guanghua School Stomatology at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou.
The strategic planning process itself made the dental schoolâs international inclusivity easy to envision.
Dr. Karl Haden, founder and president of the Academy for Academic Leadership in Atlanta, the strategic planâs facilitator, also teaches leadership development courses to the dental school faculty that educators from other U.S. institutions also attend. âWe have already been including faculty from other schools,â notes Nattestad. âIt was natural for us to say, âWhy donât we expand?ââ
Expansion, indeed. While it regularly welcomes visiting international educators, the Dugoni School of Dentistry recently contracted with the University of Kuwait to provide a much more comprehensive serviceâa five-year faculty training program. Nadershahi points out that the program will not be the prelude to a brain drain. âWe want to develop their graduates to return and become leaders in their own educational institution,â he explains. Young Kuwaiti dental faculty membersâone has currently begun and another is scheduled to begin in summer 2011, while a third has gone through the graduate orthodontics programâwill spend two years in the AEGD program to learn how our graduates deliver dental care, absorbing not only techniques and materials but also American dental culture and attitudes toward high standards of care. Program participants will then undergo two years of graduate work in education in conjunction with Pacificâs Benerd School of Education, and one year more in practicum teaching back at the dental school, where they will practice managing educational programs.
While the dental school has fostered relationships with schools in China, Japan, Kuwait and Thailand, among othersâin 2010 Nadershahi reported to the Alumni Association that 13 initiatives have been started with other dental schools around the worldâone of its most shining examples of a sustained, multi-factorial alliance is in Egypt. In 2003 Dr. Enaya Shararah, professor at the University of Alexandria Faculty of Dentistry in Eygpt, was traveling in California and contacted Dr. Eugene LaBarre of Pacificâs Department of Removable Prosthodontics. LaBarre, who had been to Egypt several times with his college rowing team in a show of Cold War-era âping pong diplomacy,â was willing to talk. Over the course of several visits, Shararah, who hoped to foster a connection with a U.S. dental school to help improve dental education in the Middle East, took a great liking to the faculty and teaching methods at the Dugoni School of Dentistry. She subsequently invited LaBarre to an Egyptian dental conference, during which she took him on a tour of a half-dozen local dental schools. By 2006, Shararah had become affiliated with a new private dental college, Pharos University Faculty of Dentistry, which was deeply interested in getting Pacificâs input.
Dental school participants were careful to respect their hostsâ sensitivities, but the Pharos faculty was eager to learn. âThey recognized that they had profound needs in curriculum and faculty development, in recognizing and teaching high standards,â LaBarre says. âWe realized that improvements that start in the school will ripple out into society in the form of better dental care.â LaBarre visited Pharos University Faculty of Dentistry with Nadershahi and Dr. Terry Hoover, vice chair of the Department of Dental Practice. The Dugoni School of Dentistry drew up an agreement to cooperate with the new Egyptian school, offering advice, support and curriculum development materials; exchanging faculty and students; and eventually developing joint research projects.
In 2009 two groups of dental faculty and students from Pharos University completed two-week summer visits to San Francisco, where they participated in classes and labs at the Dugoni School of Dentistry. The Egyptian students attended specially designed seminarsâin which they studied the management of such problems as pit and fissure defects and when to extract third molars in young adultsâculminating in presentation of case reports and treatment plans in front of Dugoni students. Ferrillo observes that all parties benefit from this kind of exchange of people and information. âTheir faculty and students learn our integrated curriculum and our humanistic model of education, which is nonexistent in the rest of the world,â he says. LaBarre thinks the process itself is instructive. âThis is training for us,â he says, âin how to interact and cooperate with a developing institution in the developing world.â And now, Shararah is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Removable Prosthodontics at the Dugoni School of Dentistry.
Another expression of the dental schoolâs international spirit is its formalization of student mission trips to developing countries like Fiji. Nattestad and Eve Cuny, director of environmental health and safety, are working out issues of insurance, travel safety, local government cooperation and allocation and transportation of instruments, supplies and equipment to transform such trips, previously organized outside the schoolâs auspices by the students themselves, into official Dugoni School of Dentistry delegations. His ambitions for such student ventures are much higher than simply organizing a few happy days of extracting teeth. âWe would like to avoid âhit-and-run dentistryâ that doesnât sustain itself,â Nattestad says. âWe will try to build local centers for care and patient educationâalong with alliances with other U.S. schools to help support themâthat will last after we go home.â
Many elements of the dental schoolâs strategic plan, of course, are still only beginning. Yet even in their nascent stages, Dugoni School of Dentistryâs international initiatives have already yielded significant fruit. âWeâre interested in these relationships because both sides grow,â says Nadershahi. âThey have to be beneficial not only to those we collaborate with, but to our faculty and students as well, to broaden their outlook and cross-cultural competency.â One reward is perspective, which demands an open mind and even a healthy dose of humility. âWe can protect the strength of our education and delivery models by comparing and collaborating,â Nadershahi says.
âWe canât just close our eyes and assume weâre doing everything right.â
While he is quick to characterize current progress as modest, LaBarre expresses a deep satisfaction with his international work. âThe whole experience,â he says, âincluding changes in the thinking process itselfâfor us, as well as themâis rich beyond what I can describe. I have a lot of pride that we have done something very positive.â
Nadershahi likewise sees great potential for good in the schoolâs increasingly international bent. âOur goal is to raise the bar for education,â he says, âwhich leads to improved teaching, which raises the level of care, which ultimately improves access to care. This is an important legacy we can leave for the future of oral health.â
Dr. Eric K. Curtis â85 of Stafford, Arizona, is a regular contributor to Contact Point and is the author of A Century of Smiles, a book covering the dental schoolâs first 100 years.