Past Clinic and Research Days

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.

Dr. Jane A. Weintraub is the 51^st President of the American Association of Dental, Oral and Craniofacial Research (AADOCR). She is first R. Gary Rozier and Chester W. Douglass Distinguished Professor in Dental Public Health and former Dean at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Adams School of Dentistry, and adjunct professor in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.  Dr. Weintraub is a diplomate of the American Board of Dental Public Health and past president of the American Association of Public Health Dentistry.  Her epidemiology and health disparities research cuts across the lifespan with a focus on prevention and relationships among oral health, healthcare, and systemic disease.

She has received the International Association for Dental Research H. Trendley Dean Memorial Award for meritorious research in epidemiology and public health, the American Dental Association’s Norton Ross Award for Clinical Research, the John W. Knutson Award from the American Public Health Association’s Oral Health Section and many others.

Prior to her deanship, she had more than 25 years of continuous NIH/NIDCR funding. From 2001-11, she was the founding director and principal investigator of the NIDCR-funded Center to Address Disparities in Children’s Oral Health, nicknamed the CAN DO Center, at the University of California San Francisco School of Dentistry.  After its first seven-year funding cycle, the CAN DO Center received $24.4 million for an additional seven years of funding. The clinical trial she conducted as part of this Center determined the efficacy of fluoride varnish to prevent early childhood caries in young children that has become the standard of care. She currently has funding from NIDCR to study the oral health of older adults and from the CareQuest Institute for Oral Health to study teledentistry vs. onsite mobile dentistry for residents in North Carolina long-term care settings.

Dr. Weintraub earned her DDS at Stony Brook University and her MPH and public health training at Harvard University. She was inducted as a Fellow of both the American and International College of Dentistry and was in the first class of AADOCR Fellows. Earlier in her career, she practiced dentistry in Boston, MA.