The best oral presentations from our PhD and DClinDent candidates from this year's SJWRI Research Day were highlighted recently with the presentation of SJWRI Postgraduate Research Presentation Awards. Congratulations to Ceridwen Benn and Mozammel Haque Bhuiyan on winning the DClinDent and PhD presentation awards respectively.
SJWRI Research Day 2021, our annual celebration of our research activities and achievements, was held on Thursday 9 September. The programme for Research Day featured keynote presentations from leading international researchers, and presentations from our academic staff and research students. Invited keynote speakers included Professor Jillian Cornish of the University of Auckland, and the current President of the International Association for Dental Research, Laureate Professor Eric Reynolds of the University of Melbourne. Following the success of our Clinical and Research Excellence Webinar Series last year, the meeting was livestreamed outside Dunedin, enabling University participants and outside registrants to watch live and contribute questions for the presenters.
Each year at Research Day, the best oral research presentations from our final-year doctoral students are marked with awards celebrating their excellence in research and communication. This year's SJWRI Postgraduate Research Presentation awards were presented at the Faculty of Dentistry's end-of-year function on Friday 17 December. Congratulations to the following students on receiving awards.
PhD research presentation awards
| Prize | PhD candidate | Presentation title | Primary supervisor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Mozammel Haque Bhuiyan | Thermoresponsive hydrogel scaffolds to promote the regeneration of brain tissue | A/Prof Azam Ali |
| 2nd | Asrar Elahi | Development of optimised sintered bovine bone block for oral grafting | Prof Warwick Duncan |
| 3rd | Hisham Mohammed | What's in a smile? Impact of malocclusion on smiling features | Prof Mauro Farella |
This year's winner, Mozammel Haque Bhuiyan, is completing his PhD under the supervision of Associate Professor Azam Ali, who joined the Faculty of Dentistry from the Department of Food Science earlier this year. Mozammel's PhD research focuses on a potential new approach for treating stroke, which is the leading cause of adult disability worldwide, by aiming to encourage regeneration in damaged brain tissue. A major difficulty is in efficiently delivering therapeutics such as drugs or growth factors through the blood-brain barrier to the site of injury, without off-target effects. A promising approach, which Mozammel and his supervisor are looking at, is in using biopolymer hydrogels as a carrier for therapeutics in preclinical stroke models. In his Research Day presentation, Mozammel presented work where silk fibroin was combined with chitosan to prepare an injectable thermoresponsive hydrogel bioscaffold (THB), which was characterized to evaluate its suitability for direct implantation into the brain in a rodent model of stroke.
PhD presentation award winners Mozammel Haque Bhuiyan, Asrar Elahi and Hisham Mohammed, with Dentistry Dean Professor Mike Morgan.
DClinDent research presentation awards
| Prize | DClinDent candidate | Clinical discipline | Presentation title | Primary supervisor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Ceridwen Benn | Special Needs Dentistry | Promoting oral health in pregnancy: exploring the needs of Lead Maternity Care midwives | Mr Graeme Ting |
| 2nd | Gabrielle Hunt | Endodontics | Students' perceptions of undergraduate endodontic teaching at the University of Otago | A/Prof Lara Friedlander |
| 3rd | Julia Smith | Orthodontics | Predictability of lower incisor root tip with the Invisalign appliance | Prof Mauro Farella |
Ceridwen Benn recently completed her DClinDent by distance study, under the supervision of Mr Graeme Ting, our head of discipline of Special Needs Dentistry. Ceri's research looked at investigating how lead maternity care midwives provide oral health advice and promotion during pregnancy, to identify education needs of LMC midwives and what enablers and barriers exist to the provision of oral health advice and promotion, and to inform resource development to support the provision of this advice.
Ceri and Julia Smith (third in the DClinDent competition) were also winners of presentation awards from this year's Faculty of Dentistry Clinical Excellence Day in July, in which our final-year DClinDent students present clinical case studies from their specialist training. Julia, who won the Clinical Excellence Day presentation competition, is pictured below.
Congratulations to all recipients of these awards, and thanks to all who helped make SJWRI Research Day 2021 such a success. Research Day will return in 2022; for more information, please keep an eye on the SJWRI website, the Research Day website or our social media channels on Facebook and Twitter.
Ceridwen Benn.
Mozammel Haque Bhuiyan.