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Dr. Debora Matthews receives the NCOHR Leadership Excellence Award  

Congratulations go out to assistant dean of academics, Dr. Debora Matthews. She was presented with a Leadership Excellence Award from the Network for Canadian Oral Health Research (NCOHR) on December 13 for her work to create the network in 2012. Director of NCOHR Dr. Alain Moreau presented Matthews with a plaque as part of a town hall meeting at Dalhousie University.

Matthews was the director of NCOHR between 2012 and 2016. She worked to bring together oral health researchers from all 10 Canadian dental schools. The aim was to create ways for oral health researchers to share ideas and resources and work together to build capacity. Before the creation of NCOHR, researchers tended to work individually or in small groups and often competed with each other for funding and other resources.

NCOHR works to link oral health researchers from the ten Canadian dental programs who have shared research interests at workshops where they can plan new research. It also strives to expand educational and training foundations to promote the next generation of Canadian oral health researchers.

Through her efforts, Matthews was successful in gaining initial funding through a Catalyst Network grant funded by the Institute of Musculoskeletal Health and Arthritis of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), with partnership funding from the Canadian Dental Association, the Association of Canadian Faculties of Dentistry, the Network for Oral Health and Bone Research, and all 10 Canadian faculties of dentistry.

The CIHR announced on December 12 that NCOHR has received a further $850,000 in funding.

The Faculty of Dentistry's NCOHR researchers