SJWRI Research Day 2018 celebrates our research excellence

Thursday 30 August 2018 11:31am

SJWRI Research Day 2018, highlighting the research achievements of the University of Otago's Sir John Walsh Research Institute and Faculty of Dentistry, was held on Thursday 30 August at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Now in its twelfth year, the Institute's annual celebration of research excellence was structured around the emergent themes of Understanding the Oral Health of New Zealanders, New Technologies and Therapeutics, and Evaluating our Teaching, Learning and Practice.

SJWRI Research Day 2018 schedule and abstracts

As in previous years, the opening session of Research Day spotlighted one of our areas of research strength as our featured research programme; this year, within the opening theme of Understanding the Oral Health of New Zealanders, our featured programme was Dental Epidemiology and Public Health, led by Professor Murray Thomson.

Our opening keynote was given by invited speaker Professor Marco Peres, Director of ARCPOH (the Australian Research Centre for Population Oral Health) at the Adelaide Dental School, who provided an overview of population-based oral health-related studies conducted in Australia and their relevance for surveillance and hypothesis-driven research. 

Our New Technologies and Therapeutics theme was headlined by a keynote presentation from invited speaker Professor Paul Cooper of the University of Birmingham, who is currently a Sir Thomas Sidey Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Dentistry. Professor Cooper's presentation explored his research interests in dental tissue regeneration, identifying modifying factors involved in the ability of the dentine-pulp complex to heal itself and developing novel treatment approaches to facilitate these innate regenerative abilities.

The programme for the day also featured a presentation from Dr Young-Chul Kwon, Asia-Pacific Scientific Affairs & Education Manager for 3M Oral Care, providing an update on dental composites with a focus on clinical relevance. The day concluded with presentation of the SJWRI Awards for 2018, and farewell drinks in the ODT Gallery.

Research Day 2018 programme booklet, including biographies of invited speakers and abstracts of their presentations

Research Day presentation awards

Presentation awards were made to the best student oral presentations across the day, as well as the best student and staff poster competition entries. Congratulations to the following Research Day presentation award winners:

Student oral presentation awards

First prize	Poppy Horne, DClinDent candidate (Periodontics) Psychosocial aspects of periodontal disease diagnosis and treatment (PE Horne, LA Foster Page, JW Leichter, WM Thomson, ET Knight)
Second prize	Chuen Lin Hong, PGDipComDent candidate Personality, dental neglect, and oral health: a longitudinal study (CL Hong, WM Thomson, JM Broadbent)
Third prize	Divya Ramanan, DClinDent candidate (Orthodontics) Jaw muscle overload as a possible cause of orofacial pain (D Ramanan, S Palla, A Polonowita, M Farella)

Poster presentation awards

Student	Hafizi Mohd Ali, DClinDent candidate Quality evaluation of dental records and patient satisfaction following periodontal surgery (HM Ali, A Tawse-Smith, J Broadbent, W Duncan)
Staff (two awards)	Christina Gee, Assistant Research Fellow Antimicrobial and cytotoxicity effects of silver nanoparticles on primary human gingival fibroblasts in vitro (C Gee, G Cotton, W Duncan, A Jude, D Abdelmoneim, D Coates)
	Dr Jithendra Ratnayake, Assistant Research Fellow Structural and biological characterization of a xenograft material developed from bovine cancellous bone (J Ratnayake, M Gould, M Mucalo, G Dias)

The SJWRI Awards for 2018 were also presented as part of the closing session.

Thanks to all who attended, and helped make Research Day 2018 another resounding success.