Upcoming Webinar: Race, Racism and Oral Health in America
| CDC’s Division of Oral Health is hosting the next webinar in their Dental Public Health Lecture Series. These webinars are for current dental public health residents, prospective residents, and anyone interested in the field of dental public health. They are designed to help dental public health residents gain a better understanding of the 10 dental public health competencies outlined in the American Board of Dental Public Health. They feature experts in dental public health to provide a deeper dive into their experiences and each competency, and other current topics in the field. The next webinar will feature Raul I. Garcia, DMD, MMedSc, who will be presenting “Race, Racism, and Oral Health in America.” Dr. Garcia’s bio can be found below. This webinar will take place on Wednesday, May 25, 2022, from 1:00–2:30 PM EDT. Learning Objectives:Understand the development and use of race/ethnicity categories in analysis of population data in the U.S.Understand ways to measure the impact of racism on health and well-being.Understand the role of racism on the persistence of oral health inequities in the U.S. |
| Please check the Dental Public Health Lecture Series Website for updates. For questions about our upcoming lecture, please reach out to the Residency Director, Gina Thornton-Evans, DDS, MPH. Presenter: Raul I. Garcia, DMD, MMedSc, is Professor and Chair, Department of Health Policy and Health Services Research at the Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine. He is also the Director of the Center for Research to Evaluate and Eliminate Dental Disparities, established at Boston University in 2001 and supported by the National Institutes of Health. The Center’s aims are to identify the determinants of oral health disparities and to design and implement community-based interventions to eliminate oral health disparities, with a primary focus on children and their caregivers. In addition, he is the Director of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Dental Longitudinal Study (DLS), a decades-long investigation on aging and oral health. The VA-DLS has also examined the role that oral conditions may play as risk factors for cardiovascular disease and other systemic health outcomes, and how oral conditions may affect health-related quality of life. At the national level, Dr. Garcia has served as President (1998-1999) of the Hispanic Dental Association, the national organization whose primary mission is to improve the oral health of Latinos in the U.S. He is also a Past-President (2017-2018) of the American Association for Dental Research. Currently, he is a member of the National Advisory Dental and Craniofacial Research Council, of the National Institutes of Health. In 2019, he became the first dentist appointed to serve on the Advisory Committee on Minority Health of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The Committee advises HHS on policies and programs for improving the health of racial and ethnic minority populations in the U.S. At the local level, he has served as Chair, and current member, of the Massachusetts Oral Health Advocacy Task Force, and as President (2010-2011) of Health Care for All, Inc., the major consumer-based health advocacy organization in Massachusetts. Dr. Garcia is a 1981 graduate of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, where he received the DMD degree summa cum laude. He is a Fellow of the American College of Dentists. |