Last September in Minneapolis, the following members of Penn Vet’s Dentistry and Oral Surgery Service received awards at the Veterinary Dental Forum—the largest veterinary dental conference and longest continually running meeting of its type:
Bonnie Miller received the Foundation for Veterinary Dentistry (F4VD)/Hill’s Research and Education Award, sponsored by Hill’s Pet Nutrition, which recognized her outstanding contributions in the area of veterinary dentistry and in helping to achieve the F4VD mission. Miller is a registered dental hygienist employed full-time at Penn Vet’s Dentistry and Oral Surgery Service since the late 1980s. Beyond general duties in support of clinicians, she has trained six part-time and 21 full-time residents graduating from Penn Vet and has also been involved in the training of hundreds of other veterinarians and technicians. She was instrumental as an advisor for the Academy of Veterinary Dental Technicians prior to its founding in 2002. She is a frequent regional, state, national, and international didactic speaker and laboratory instructor, and she has authored and co-authored numerous journal and book articles. Additionally, she is one of the most sought-after experts for professionally scoring periodontal disease in scientific dog and cat studies involving the evaluation of effectiveness of products for retardation of plaque and calculus accumulation.
Dental resident Dr. Lenin Villamizar Martinez received the Debra B. Smith Journal of
Veterinary Dentistry (JVD) Editor’s Award for his publication entitled Morphologic and
morphometric description of the temporomandibular joint in the domestic dog using computed tomography. This award recognizes the most outstanding manuscript published in the JVD by a resident during the year preceding the Veterinary Dental Forum. With Dr. Lisa Fink receiving it in 2015 for a study on prosthodontic therapy in dogs, this is the second year in a row that a Penn Vet resident received this recognition. The full references for the two publications read as follows:
Villamizar-Martinez LA, Villegas CM, Gioso MA, Reiter AM, Patricio GC, Pinto AC.
Morphologic and morphometric description of the temporomandibular joint in the domestic dog using computed tomography. Journal of Veterinary Dentistry 2016; 33: 75-82.
Fink L, Reiter AM. Assessment of 68 prosthodontic crowns in 41 pet and working dogs
(2000-2012). Journal of Veterinary Dentistry 2015; 32: 148-154.
In addition, Villamizar Martinez and fellow dental residents Dr. Ignacio Velazquez and Dr. Ana Castejon; dental hygienist and technician Jeanette Eliason; and dental technician Wendi Rensman gave presentations on various scientific dental topics.