When Oregon restructured its school system around seven years ago, George Mendoza was charged with aligning different segments — early learning, K-12 and higher education — to ensure children were prepared at every stage of schooling. He worked w...

Dr. Mollie Day has spent her 17-year career in dentistry serving communities who have a difficult time accessing oral health care. Three years ago she joined Heartland Community Health Center in Lawrence, Kansas — a federally qualified health cen...

Like many Philadelphians, Dr. Janine Burkhardt uses the city’s subway system to get to work. But her time isn’t spent commuting — it’s spent providing dental care to individuals experiencing homelessness at the Hub of Hope, a clinic located under...

Molly Johnson is working with a team of community partners to improve oral health outcomes in Oregon’s Lincoln County, a region isolated — both geographically and in terms of access to medical care — along the state’s coast. As Director of Medicaid...

Dr. Mark Deutchman is on a mission to ensure oral health is truly considered a part of overall health — and driving that mission starts with his students. A family medicine physician, Deutchman teaches oral health curriculum in the University of ...

Julie Smithwick is bringing health care to South Carolina’s hardest-to-reach populations through an approach she learned early on in her career: mobilizing community health workers.  Smithwick first trained as a community health worker herself...

Heidi Halverson only goes into the office three days a week. But she doesn’t take a break the other days — she runs her own company, Dental Hygiene at Home. As a dental hygienist with nearly 40 years of experience, Halverson decided seven years a...

Drs. Loray and Harvey Spencer opened their dental practice, A Healthy Smile Family and Cosmetic Dentistry, in rural South Carolina nearly five years ago with a simple mission in mind: to make dental care available to anyone at any time. They’ve t...

Dr. Ray Lyons has dedicated his dental career of more than 40 years to treating people with disabilities. His Albuquerque-based Special Needs Dental Clinic, part of the New Mexico Department of Health, treats individuals with intellectual and dev...

My name is Alex Davis III, and I'm 28 years old. I work at the Lee Specialty Clinic (LSC) as a dental assistant, and I help individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities get through their dental appointments. I don't know how thi...

A leader in Preventistry, Dr. Jim Thommes says he asks himself every day, “What ideas can I come up with... that will improve the oral health care of all?” Dr. Jim Thommes has witnessed the evolution of preventive care in dentistry throughout ...

Five years ago, Jennifer Geiselhofer decided to redirect her 20-some years of experience to change how dental care is delivered in Denver. She founded Dental At Your Door to bring “portable, preventative dental care” to individuals and organizati...

Dr. Kathleen Barlow spends her weekdays caring for underserved populations as a dentist at a federally qualified community health center (FQHC) in Hillsborough County, Fla. And on weekends, she doesn’t let up: She traverses the county as a volunt...

Tee Lawton has helped New York’s South Bronx neighborhood for decades as a public servant. As Director of Community Relations at the Mount Hope Housing Company, he meets with community boards and government officials and oversees community outrea...

Dennis Borel has dedicated his career to lifting up disadvantaged populations, just “trying to make their worlds a little bit better,” as he humbly puts it. The last two decades have been with the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities (CTD), a cr...

Dr. Neetu Singh began her career as a dentist but quickly redirected her expertise to work in public policy after witnessing firsthand the disparities among patients seeking oral health care. Singh now serves as Oral Health Program Director at He...

Alicia Murria credits Jacksonville’s erratic weather systems for her recent career shift from hygienist to nonprofit founder. It was there on Florida’s east coast, during the American Dental Hygienists Association’s annual conference in 2017, tha...

Crystal Terry and the Alabama Head Start teams strive to ensure Alabama’s low-income children and parents get the health care, education and social services they need every single day. As the health resource specialist at Community Action Partner...

Dr. Gregory Stoute’s 40-plus-year career in dentistry has taken him from conflict zones in Iraq to the prestigious halls of Harvard, working in all kinds of dental practices. And though his tenure is peppered with distinguished titles, he’s remai...

Michelle Vacha has worked for more than a decade to provide holistic oral health care to Colorado’s low-income populations — a feat that’s required innovation and ingenuity along the way. In 2006, the Colorado Springs-based hygienist founded Comm...

  Dr. Paul Glassman has seen firsthand how powerful Preventistry® can be. For the first 20 years of his career as a dentist, Glassman treated patients who’d missed out on preventive care along the way and were, as he put it, at the end of a lo...