With the April issue, the School of Dentistry Newsletter is moving to an HTML format, in order to better serve you by providing a shorter news cycle.

Accreditation Site Visit Is Upon Us: April 12-14, 2005

The accreditation site team will be here from 7:30 am on Tuesday April 12 to 11:00 am on Thursday April 14. The team is made up of 16 members who are faculty at various dental schools from around the country, and chaired by the Dean from University of Illinois, Chicago, Dr. Bruce Graham.
We look forward to welcoming them to campus and sharing our excellent educational and research programs with them. The team will be touring our facilities and interviewing faculty, staff and students all day Tuesday and Wednesday.

Everyone has worked very hard to analyze, document and improve our programs during the accreditation self-study process. The site visit is an important time to meet the evaluators and answer questions. There is no doubt that the outcome of the site visit and the entire process will be extremely positive. Thank you for all you have done to advance this process.

Town Hall Meeting Scheduled

We will be holding a town hall meeting on Thursday, April 14, from 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm in C-701 to discuss CODA's Accreditation findings. This session is open to all faculty, staff and students. Feel free to ask any questions you might have about Accreditation to me or Dean Bertolami.

-- Dr. Dorothy Perry, Associate Professor and Assistant Dean for Curricular Affairs

Research Day 2005 Wrapup

Research Day 2005 Judge Caroline Damsky and Dean Charles Bertolami with Research Day 2005 award winners. (left to right: Markus Hardt, Damsky, Sunita Ho, Gloria Khoo, Joanne Rahman, Nancy Kwon, Guive Balooch, Dean Charles Bertolami)

Click here for a full list of Research Day winners and additional photographs.

Awards/Honors/Recognition
Third-year dental student Jin Kim will serve as Councilor for the 2005-06 Executive Board of the National Student Research Group of the International Association of Dental Research. He will serve through the AADR meeting in March, 2006.

Stanley Liu, a second-year dental student who is serving a one-year externship at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has been invited to give an oral presentation at the 10th International Congress on Oral Cancer in Crete, Greece. April 19-24, 2005. Liu will attend the meeting with his mentor, Dr. Brian Schmidt, and Dr. Sol Silverman, who will also be presenting at the conference.

Guive Balooch, a third-year PhD Student in the Oral and Craniofacial Sciences Program, won first place in the Senior Category of the American Association of Dental Research's Pfizer Hatton Awards. He was awarded with $1,000. Balooch also came in second place in the Senior Category of the International Association of Dental Research's Hatton Award.

His presentation, "Effect of TGF-beta Signaling on Overall Bone Matrix Mechanical Properties," is currently under consideration for publication. Balooch performed the research with the mentorship of Dr. Bill Marshall and Dr. Sally Marshall, Preventive and Restorative Dental Sciences; and Dr. Rik Derynck and Dr. Tamara Alliston, Department of Cell and Tissue Biology.

Balooch described his work as follows:
"Our research lies within the bridge between materials science engineering and biological sciences. We are interested in the cytokine Transforming Growth Factor-beta (TGF-beta), which is highly present in bone and has a complex effect on all stages of the osteoblast cell life. TGF-beta's importance and abundance in all stages of bone formation led us to hypothesize that it will play a role in regulating the mechanical properties of the bone matrix laid down by osteoblasts. To test this hypothesis, we used several genetically modified mouse models with different levels of TGF-beta signaling to determine if TGF-beta regulates mechanical properties of mouse bone matrix independently of its effects on bone mass and architecture. As a result of our research we found that partial reduction of TGF-beta signaling in bone is sufficient to produce bone with increased cortical thickness, trabecular bone volume, mineral content and local mechanical quality, enabling these bones to better resist fracture. This is the first description of growth factor control of bone matrix mechanical quality."

Four UCSF School of Dentistry students won $2000 Chela Education Financing Scholarships.

1. Perline Akhavan (D2)
2. Ugo Emmanual Anakwenze (D2)
3. Esmeralda Munoz (D1)
4. Hang Pham (D1)
5. Juan Argueta Trujillo (Pharmacy)

Diane Snyder was the staff winner of the Clinics and Administration Outstanding Customer Service Award for the Fall 2004 quarter:

This award was approved in recognition of specific instances of outstanding customer service and consistent job performance. All employees of Clinics and Administration excluding deans, directors, and temporary staff, who have at least overall satisfactory ratings on their current performance evaluations and have no documented disciplinary actions within the last 12-month period are eligible for this award.

The following employees were recognized in the last quarter of 2004 for milestone tenure awards:

Dean's Office

Mary Sheridan (5 years)
Shirley Hodges (25 years)

Dental Clinics

David Foster, Tracie Ginest (5 years)
Molly Newlon (15 years)

Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery

Ann Martin Giron (5 years)

Orofacial Sciences

Mary Ijichi (20 years)
Gloria Yoshida (30 years)

Preventive & Restorative Dental Sciences

Mariola Tellis (15 years)

First-year UCSF dental student Elaine Chow has been selected as a recipient of the 2005 Summer Dental Student Award from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. Her eight-week program will take place in Bethesda, Maryland. The program includes a monthly stipend. Chow is doing research on craniofacial development using knockout gene chick embryos in the Craniofacial Developmental Biology and Regeneration Branch, headed by Dr Kenneth Yamada. Chow's mentor will be Dr. Yukinori Endo.