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2017 Guest Lecturers

 

  1. Friday, March 3rd - Dr. Lindsey Robinson

  2. Thursday, April 6th - Dr. Bruce Dye

  3. Friday, April 14th - Dr. John Yamamoto

  4. Wednesday, April 18th - Dr. Gerald Kominski

  5. Friday, April 28th - Dr. Lorena Espinosa

  6. Friday, May 12th - Dr. Howard Pollick

  7. Friday, May 19th - Dr. Mary Tavares

Dr. Lindsey Robinson

Dr. Robinson is a board-certified pediatric dentist, and has maintained a full-time dental practice in Grass Valley, California for the past twenty years.  She received her certificate in pediatric dentistry from the University of Florida and her DDS degree from the University of Southern California.  She is a past president of the California Society of Pediatric Dentistry and the California Dental Association, and served as chair of the California Dental Association Foundation.  Dr. Robinson was a member of the ADA Council on Access, Prevention, and Interprofessional Relations for six years, and during her tenure served as vice-chair for a year and chair for two years.  As a CAPIR member she chaired two access to care summits, one focusing on Native Americans.  Dr. Robinson has served on the National Academy of Medicine Health Literacy Roundtable as the oral health representative for the last three years.  She has been a guest editor for six issues of the CDA Journal on a variety of topics including oral health literacy, perinatal oral health, and medical/dental integration.  Currently Dr. Robinson serves the ADA as the Thirteenth District Trustee from California.

Dr. Bruce Dye

After graduating from the Ohio State University College of Dentistry, CAPT Bruce Dye began his USPHS career assigned to the Indian Health Service working in IHS clinics and hospitals in South Dakota and Michigan as a clinical dentist and program director. He later completed a MPH at the University of Michigan, epidemiology training at Johns Hopkins University, and a dental public health residency at NIDCR. For more than a decade, he was a dental epidemiology officer at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) / Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) responsible for managing the oral health content on the National Health and Nutrition and Examination Survey (NHANES).

CAPT Dye is an active diplomate on the American Board of Dental Public Health and has served as a site visitor for the Commission on Dental Accreditation (CODA) for the DPH specialty. Currently, he is a Dental Epidemiology Officer and Director of the Dental Public Health Training program for the NIDCR. He is also the co-lead in the development of a Dental Informatics Fellowship with the National Library of Medicine that will begin this summer."

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Dr. John Yamamoto

John M. Yamamoto, D.D.S., M.P.H., is the Vice President of Professional Services at Delta Dental of California.  After receiving his Doctor of Dental Surgery from UCSF in 1992 he spent seven years in private practice in Southern California.  From this private practice experience, he developed an interest in the issues of quality and access to dental care and returned to school. Dr. Yamamoto completed a Masters in Public Health in Health Services-Policy from UCLA in 2001 and completed a Dental Public Health Residency from UCSF in 2003. Dr. Yamamoto joined the UCLA School of Dentistry faculty and served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Division of Public Health and Community Dentistry from 2001 to 2008.  

 

During his time at UCLA, Dr. Yamamoto served as the Director of the Wilson-Jennings-Bloomfield UCLA Venice Dental Center, a community-based dental clinic that serves a low-income population from the Venice and surrounding communities. Dr. Yamamoto taught courses in public health dentistry as well as clinical dentistry. His research interests focused on health services research involving access to dental care and he served as a reviewer for the Journal of the California Dental Association and the Journal of the American Association of Public Health Dentistry.  In addition, Dr. Yamamoto was a clinical consultant to the California Department of Managed Health Care and Managed Healthcare Unlimited, Inc.

 

Dr. Yamamoto joined Delta Dental in 2008 and serves as the company’s key dental authority on clinical policy issues with responsibility for overseeing the areas of quality assessment, utilization management, dental policy, and research for Delta Dental of California, Delta Dental of Pennsylvania, Delta Dental Insurance Company, Delta Dental of New York, and affiliated companies. This group forms one of the largest dental benefits systems in the country, providing benefits to over 33 million enrollees in 15 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico and provides access to a dental network of over 96,000 dentists. This organization generates over $8 billion in annual revenues through the sale and delivery of dental insurance benefits and administration to commercial groups, state and federal government programs, as well as public and private health care exchanges. 

 

 

Dr. Lorena Espinoza

Dr. Lorena Espinoza, DDS, MPH, is the Division of Oral Health’s Associate Director for Science and Team Lead for the surveillance, investigations, and research team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In that role, she has been providing technical advice and oversight of the Division’s research and surveillance projects; assisting in preparing, reviewing, and/or clearing documents and other materials; and participating as a member of the Division leadership and management team.

 

Lorena first joined CDC in 2001 as a DOH Dental Public Health Resident. In 2002, she was accepted as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officer, and joined the HIV Incidence and Case Surveillance Branch, Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention (DHAP), National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention. (NCHHSTP). Following her service as an EIS officer, she continued in the branch as a Senior Epidemiologist. In 2010, she served as the Acting Branch Chief for Surveillance and Epidemiology in the CDC South Africa Office, Division of Global HIV/AIDS, Center for Global Health. In 2013, she rejoined the HIV Incidence and Case Surveillance Branch as Team Lead for Reporting, Analysis, and Evaluation in the HIV Incidence and Case Surveillance Branch, DHAP, NCHHSTP. In that role, she oversaw the activities of the National HIV Surveillance System, including the development of a technical guidance and evaluation process and outcome standards.

 

She received her Doctor of Dental Surgery degree and Master of Public Health degree in Epidemiology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her Dental Public Health Certificate from CDC.

 

 

 

Dr. Mary Tavares

Dr. Tavares is the Program Director of the Advanced Graduate Education Program in Dental Public Health at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. She is also a Senior Clinical Investigator at The Forsyth Institute in Cambridge, MA. A graduate of Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, she received an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health and a certificate in Dental Public Health from Boston University Goldman School of Dental Medicine. Dr. Tavares is a 1990 alumnus of the Robert Wood Johnson Health Services Research Fellowship for dental faculty.

With a research career spanning three decades, Dr. Tavares was part of a Forsyth team that collaborated with the Kuwait Ministry of Health to create a demonstration program featuring a state of the art dental care delivery system for children in the 1980's. She still travels to Kuwait as an advisor with the Kuwait School Oral Health Program. Additionally, Dr. Tavares was a co-Principal Investigator in the NIH-funded New England Children's Amalgam Trial which examined the safety of using mercury amalgam fillings in children.

Currently Dr. Tavares' research looks into the connection between systemic and oral health, with a particular focus on obesity and diabetes. She developed The Healthy Weight Intervention program for children to be used in dental offices. She has written several chapters and papers on the topic of obesity intervention in the dental setting. With a focus on both clinical and public health research, Dr. Tavares is interested in bringing about policy change that has an impact on dental health. Her ultimate goal is to ensure better oral health and overall wellness for the community. "If people are getting good dental care, which is of course our hope, they are seeing a dentist on a regular basis. This provides the ideal platform for prevention and wellness programs in which the profession should participate."

Dr. Gerald Kominski, Ph.D

Gerald F. Kominski is a Professor of Health Policy and Management and Director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Dr. Kominski’s current research focuses primarily on evaluating the effects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). His research interests throughout his career have focused more generally on evaluating the cost and policy impacts of health care programs and technologies, with a special emphasis on public insurance programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and Workers’ Compensation.

Dr. Kominski joined the UCLA faculty in 1989, after spending three and one half years working for the congressional agency responsible for monitoring Medicare hospital payment policies, now known as the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC). He received his Ph.D. in public policy analysis from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School in 1985, and his A.B. in chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1978. He is editor and co-author of the best-selling textbook, Changing the U.S. Health Care System: Key Issues in Health Services Policy and Management, which was published in its 4th edition in 2014.

Dr. Howard Pollick, BDS, MPH

Dr. Howard Pollick is a licensed dentist in California, a health sciences clinical professor and director of the dental public health residency program, Department of Preventive & Restorative Dental Sciences, School of Dentistry at the University of California San Francisco.

Dr. Pollick has lectured extensively on the benefits and safety of community water fluoridation in California, nationally and internationally.

Dr. Pollick’s scholarly work includes his role as principal investigator for the 1993-94 California Oral Health Needs Assessment of Children. He has authored several peer-reviewed articles, is a reviewer for several scientific journals and has contributed 2 chapters on Community Water Fluoridation, and on Topical Fluoride for the 2014 edition of the textbook Primary Preventive Dentistry.

He has been a Chair of the Oral Health Section and Governing Councilor of the American Public Health Association.

A diplomate of the American Board of dental public health (since 1985), Dr. Pollick is an American Dental Association expert spokesperson on fluoridation (since 2004), a member of the ADA National Fluoridation Advisory Committee, chair of the fluoridation advisory committee to the California Dental Association Foundation and a consultant to the California Department of Public Health.

He is the recipient of the 2010 Fluoridation Special Merit Award from the Association of State and Territorial Dental Directors and the 2015 recipient of the UCSF Chancellor’s Award for Public Service.

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