Dental College of Georgia awarded prestigious NIH grant

The Dental College of Georgia at Augusta University has been awarded a prestigious UO1 grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The grant, which totals close to $800,000 over the next five years, will support the development of a multi-component project entitled “Clinician-Scientist Research Incubator for Practice-based Training (Clin.ScRIPT).”

Significant additional financial support is being provided by the office of the senior vice president for research, led by Michael Diamond, MD; the office of the dean of The Graduate School at AU, under the direction of Jennifer C. Sullivan, PhD; and the office of the dean of DCG, led by Nancy Young, DMD.

Clin.ScRIPT will focus on training DCG faculty, residents and students on clinical research. The project will include the creation of a formal two-year Master of Science in Clinical Dental Research program, as well as a Clinical Research Network, Resource Center and Mentorship Pathway, a Southeastern Regional Dental Research Symposium and a developmental, multi-site clinical research study. The approval of the new MS program is awaiting approval by the USG Board of Regents.

“We are honored to have been awarded this prestigious grant from the NIDCR,” said Todd Schoenbaum, DDS, professor in the Department of Restorative Sciences and the principal investigator on the grant. “This funding will allow us to develop a comprehensive environment that will train the next generation of clinician-scientists and help to move the DCG to the forefront of discovery and innovation in oral health.”

Babak Baban, PhD, DCG’s associate dean for research; Mira Ghaly, DMD, associate professor in the Department of Periodontics; Marshall Newman, DMD, assistant professor in the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery; and Jie Chen, PhD, interim chair of Biostatistics, Data Science and Epidemiology, make up the team from AU.

The Augusta University team is joined by co-investigators Tara Aghaloo, DDS, professor of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at UCLA, and Carlo Ercoli, DDS, professor of prosthodontics, periodontics and implant surgery and chairman of the Prosthodontic Department at the University of Rochester.

DCG is one of only a select few dental schools nationwide to have been awarded this UO1 grant. Other recipients include Harvard University, The University of California, San Francisco, Stanford University, Temple University, Indiana University and the University of Maryland.

“This grant is a significant milestone for DCG,” Baban said. “It will have a profound impact on our ability to train clinician-scientists and improve oral health care in Georgia, the U.S. and worldwide.”