Faculty Bibliography

The routine evaluation of teaching effectiveness is important in improving faculty, departmental, and institutional efforts. There are three main categories of assessments: those performed by students, peers, and self. Although each category is independently valid, a collection of data from all three categories leads to a more comprehensive outcome and a creation of a triangulation model. The purpose of this study was to identify commonly used methods of assessing teaching effectiveness and to suggest the use of a triangulation model, which has been advocated in the literature on performance assessment as an optimal approach for evaluating teaching effectiveness. A twelve-question survey was sent to all U.S. dental schools to identify evaluation methods as well as to find evidence of triangulation. Thirty-nine out of fifty-seven schools responded. The majority of the schools used student evaluations (81 percent) and peer reviews (78 percent). A minority of schools reported using self-evaluations (31 percent). Less than one in five dental schools reported using all three strategies to achieve triangulation (19 percent). The three most commonly used evaluation methods ('performed routinely') were all in the student evaluation category. Less than half of the schools routinely evaluated clinical teaching effectiveness by any means (42 percent). In conclusion, dental schools should implement a triangulation process, in which evaluation data are obtained from students, peers, and self to provide a comprehensive and composite assessment of teaching effectiveness

INTRODUCTION: While protein-energy malnutrition may have multiple effects on oral tissues and subsequent disease development, reports of the effect of malnutrition on the human salivary glands are sparse. METHODS: A retrospective cohort study of the effect of early childhood protein-energy malnutrition (EC-PEM) and adolescent nutritional status on salivary flow and pH was conducted with rural Haitian children, ages 11-19 years (n=1017). Malnutrition strata exposure cohorts were based on 1988-1996 weight-for-age records which covered the birth through 5-year-old period for all subjects. Then, data on current anthropometrical defined nutritional status categories, stimulated and unstimulated salivary flow rates, and salivary pH were collected for the same subjects of 11-19 years old during field examinations in the summer of 2005. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used for the analyses. RESULTS: Stimulated and unstimulated salivary flow rates were reduced at statistically significant levels in subjects who had experienced severe malnutrition in their early childhood or who had continuing nutrition stress which resulted in delayed growth, as measured at ages 11-19 years. Salivary pH demonstrated little clinically meaningful variability between malnourished and nonmalnourished groups. CONCLUSION: This study is the first to report of a continuing effect on diminished salivary gland function into adolescence as a result of early childhood malnutrition (EC-PEM) and suggests that exocrine glandular systems may be compromised for extended periods following EC-PEM, which may have important implications for the body's systemic antimicrobial defences

Pierre Fauchard (1678-1761) is considered the father of modern dentistry. His seminal book, Le Chirurgien Dentiste, ou Traite des Dents (1728), is the discipline's first complete work. During the five years preceding its publication (1723-1728), Pierre Fauchard sought the opinions, contributions, and 'approbation' (approval) of 19 of his colleagues: six physicians, 12 surgeons, and one dentist. The first and most important contributor to the manuscript was Jean Devaux, surgeon and mentor to Fauchard. The next six reviewers were illustrious physicians and scientists of the time: Philippe Hecquet, Jean-Claude Adrien Helvetius, Jean Baptiste Silva, Antoine DeJussieu, Raymond Jacob Finot, and Antoine Benignus Winslow. The subsequent 12 reviewers were all sworn-surgeons (certified by St. Come), including a lone dentist, Laudumiey, surgeon-dentist to His Majesty, Philip V, King of Spain. Fauchard knew that for dentistry to be regarded as a learned profession, and perhaps for Fauchard to be recognized as its leader, he needed the support and approval of the establishment before publishing his book. This is an account of how he attained this endorsement

Health care, including oral health care and oral health education, is under great stress in the United States. The cost of and access to care, the cost of dental education, and a shortage of educators have led leaders in dental education, organized dentistry, and the public sector to underscore the problem. One of the proposed solutions is to find synergies and new health care and education models by building bridges among the health professions. One potential solution is being implemented at the NYU College of Dentistry (NYUCD). Dentistry and nursing are seemingly unrelated professions, and they are rarely if ever modeled together. That is about to change with the joining together of NYUCD and the Division of Nursing of the NYU Steinhardt School of Education in creating a College of Nursing within the College of Dentistry. This process has not been without controversy. Following the Division of Nursing's request to join NYUCD, and the subsequent announcement of the proposed combination by NYU in December 2004, some members of the dental profession responded by questioning the appropriateness of the merger and the similarity of the two programs. Nevertheless, substantial parallels exist in the education and practice of dentists and nurse practitioners (NP) including basic, social, and some clinical science education, practice models, research synergies, and community service. However, similarities in the core competencies of these professions have not been analyzed formally and in detail. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to compare the core competencies of nurse practitioner and dental education programs. The results show a surprising overlap of the core competencies of the dental and nursing professions (38 percent partial or total overlap). A similar overlap with medicine also exists, albeit lower (25.4 percent). These results are notable because they demonstrate that the three health professions, independently of one another, developed very similar basic competencies and learning objectives. These data should encourage other health professions programs to seek new collaborative models for education, beyond the current silos of training, and new health care delivery systems as has been strongly recommended by the Institute of Medicine. Such collaborative education redirects health care toward providing truly interdisciplinary comprehensive primary care for patients.

BACKGROUND: The channel catfish, Ictalurus punctatus, is invested with a high density of cutaneous taste receptors, particularly on the barbel appendages. Many of these receptors are sensitive to selected amino acids, one of these being a receptor for L-arginine (L-Arg). Previous neurophysiological and biophysical studies suggested that this taste receptor is coupled directly to a cation channel and behaves as a ligand-gated ion channel receptor (LGICR). Earlier studies demonstrated that two lectins, Ricinus communis agglutinin I (RCA-I) and Phaseolus vulgaris Erythroagglutinin (PHA-E), inhibited the binding of L-Arg to its presumed receptor sites, and that PHA-E inhibited the L-Arg-stimulated ion conductance of barbel membranes reconstituted into lipid bilayers. RESULTS: Both PHA-E and RCA-I almost exclusively labeled an 82-84 kDa protein band of an SDS-PAGE of solubilized barbel taste epithelial membranes. Further, both rhodamine-conjugated RCA-I and polyclonal antibodies raised to the 82-84 kDa electroeluted peptides labeled the apical region of catfish taste buds. Because of the specificity shown by RCA-I, lectin affinity was chosen as the first of a three-step procedure designed to enrich the presumed LGICR for L-Arg. Purified and CHAPS-solubilized taste epithelial membrane proteins were subjected successively to (1), lectin (RCA-I) affinity; (2), gel filtration (Sephacryl S-300HR); and (3), ion exchange chromatography. All fractions from each chromatography step were evaluated for L-Arg-induced ion channel activity by reconstituting each fraction into a lipid bilayer. Active fractions demonstrated L-Arg-induced channel activity that was inhibited by D-arginine (D-Arg) with kinetics nearly identical to those reported earlier for L-Arg-stimulated ion channels of native barbel membranes reconstituted into lipid bilayers. After the final enrichment step, SDS-PAGE of the active ion channel protein fraction revealed a single band at 82-84 kDa which may be interpreted as a component of a multimeric receptor/channel complex. CONCLUSIONS: The data are consistent with the supposition that the L-Arg receptor is a LGICR. This taste receptor remains active during biochemical enrichment procedures. This is the first report of enrichment of an active LGICR from the taste system of vertebrata

Various genes related to early events in human gustation have recently been discovered, yet a thorough understanding of taste transduction is hampered by gaps in our knowledge of the signaling chain. As a first step toward gaining additional insight, the expression specificity of genes in human taste tissue needs to be determined. To this end, a fungiform papillae cDNA library has been generated and analyzed. For validation of the library, taste-related gene probes were used to detect known molecules. Subsequently, DNA sequence analysis was performed to identify further candidates. Of 987 clones sequenced, clustering results in 288 contigs. Comparison of these contigs with genomic databases reveals that 207 contigs (71.9%) match known genes, 16 (5.6%) match hypothetical genes, eight (2.8%) match repetitive sequences and 57 (19.8%) have no or low similarity to annotated genes. The results indicate that despite a high level of redundancy, this human fungiform cDNA library contains specific taste markers and is valuable for investigation of both known and novel taste-related genes