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Going Global: Transdisciplinary Team Science in the Era of Precision Oral Medicine

Kevin Matthew Byrd, DDS, PhD is currently the Director of Cell & Molecular Biology, Anthony R. Volpe Research Scholar and Senior Manager of Oral & Craniofacial Research at the ADA Forsyth Institute and part-time Research Faculty at the University of North Carolina. He is a clinician-scientist who completed his DDS at the University of Michigan (2009-2013) and trained as a PhD and postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina Adams School of Dentistry before joining their research faculty in 2019. In 2021, Dr. Byrd has built the Lab of Oral & Craniofacial Innovation (LOCI) in commercial lab space in Maryland. His lab is broadly focused on understanding mucosal cell type discovery, patterning, and crosstalk in health and disease states in aerodigestive tissues. His active collaborations across the world work together to apply advanced sequencing methodologies to catalog the oral and craniofacial tissues at single-cell resolution, which led him to discover the oral axis of COVID-19 infection and transmission as well as to found the Human Cell Atlas Oral & Craniofacial Bionetwork in September 2020.

Since 2013, Dr. Byrd has been honored with >40 clinical/research awards and actively serves as a Special Volunteer at the NIH, Dean’s Faculty at the University of Maryland as well as a Standing Member of the 1) Oral Health Pathway Taskforce, 2) Global Alliance on Spatial Technologies (GESTALT), and a 3) national “think tank” related to clinical research design and analysis. Furthermore, he is an active Scientific Advisor to two startup companies, Arcato Laboratories, Inc. and OMAPiX, Inc. and has many active collaborations with single-cell and spatial genomics companies (Biomage, 10x, Akoya Biosciences, ACD/Biotechne). As Director, he leads teams to build and maintain global and transdisciplinary collaboration across the paradigm of basic to clinical scientists, oral health to overall health care providers, and computational to life scientists.