Grants and Philanthropy

• The Award: $21 million, 10-year grant from the U.S. Army and U.S. Department of Agriculture.
• The Research Goal: To improve the reliability of decisions made by family advocacy programs within the military, which is responsible for investigating and handling family maltreatment incidents at its installations.
• The Hope: To ensure that the Army not only disseminates the program worldwide by October 2022 with high fidelity but also that installations will continue to implement it well, despite the constant turnover in military roles.

^{Drs. Richard Heyman and Amy Slep}

• The Award: $1.5 million grant from the Health Resources and Service Administration to prepare dental and dental hygiene students to care for underserved populations, including people with disabilities and expectant mothers.
• The Goal: To support a new program, Preparing the Future, which is designed to address the national workforce shortage of dental professionals providing primary care dental services to vulnerable populations.
• The Hope: To improve the knowledge, confidence, and willingness of future dentists and dental hygienists to care for populations that lack access to dental care in their communities.  

^{Dr. Courtney Chinn}

• The Award: Generous one-year grant from United Concordia Dental Charitable Fund to support VOCARE (Veterans Oral Care Access Resource), part of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) pilot program, VETSmile: Connecting Veterans with Dentists in their Communities.
• The Goal: To help bridge the gap in veterans’ access to continuous, accessible, and affordable oral care, which is crucial to their overall health and wellbeing.
• The Hope: To provide veterans with a “dental home” to improve their overall health and quality of life and reduce the need for emergency dental care in hospitals.    
  

• The Award: $2 million, five-year grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
• The Research Goal: To contribute further to our knowledge of how PTH exerts its effects on skeletal function through the pathway previously identified by Dr. Partridge and her team.
• The Hope: To bring us closer to developing treatments for disorders of calcium metabolism and other bone and skeletal disorders.

^{Dr. Nicola Partridge}

• The Award: $2.1 million, four-year grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• The Research Goal: To fill a gap in understanding what factors predict or constrain access to dental care during pregnancy, and to use this understanding to inform the design of future interventions.
• The Hope: To improve the oral health of vulnerable women by intervening during pregnancy.

^{Dr. Stefanie Russell}

• The Award: $317,000, two-year grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
• The Research Goal: To test the hypothesis that oral cancer patients who report high levels of pain possess a higher density of TRPA1 on nerve fibers in the vicinity of the cancer.
• The Hope: To lay the foundation for further investigation of the role of TRPA1 in oral cancer pain and motivate investigation of non-opioid therapeutics that target TRPA1 for the management of oral cancer pain.

^{Dr. Aditi Bhattacharya}

• The Award: $1 million-plus, three-year grant from the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation.
• The Goal: To support the NYU Dentistry Oral Health Center for People with Disabilities, the Smiling Faces, Going Places dental van, and the Bridging the Gap program.
• The Hope: To continue to improve oral health access and outcomes in underserved communities.

• The Award: One-year grant from the American Society of Dental Anesthesiologists
• The Research Goal: To determine the efficacy of a multisensory room as compared to a standard preoperative waiting room in decreasing pre- and postoperative anxiety, emergence delirium, and short- and long-term postoperative pain and adverse behavioral effects in pediatric patients with ASD undergoing general anesthesia for dental treatment.
• The Hope: Not only to improve outcomes for pediatric patients with ASD, but also for children with other disabilities and typically developing children with dental anxiety and/or sensory processing difficulties.

^{Dr. Spencer Wade}