Category: News

Second year dental students, Jessica Latimer and Marcus Hwang, have been selected by the University of Washington School of Dentistry to receive the 2018 Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Award. This award honors students from each of the University of Washington (UW) Health Sciences schools who exemplify Martin Luther King Jr.’s principles through commitment to addressing community needs, particularly communities of color and low-income, development and implementation of significant programs to improve the human condition, and outstanding efforts to protect and empower all individuals.

In addition to the excellent contributions made by Latimer and Hwang to global oral health research at the DeRouen Center, the pair works to increase accessibility to dental care for underserved communities in Washington State through their 501(c)3 non-profit organization, Husky Health Bridge (HHB). Co-founded by Latimer and Hwang and three other students in November 2016, Husky Health Bridge collaborates with the UW School of Dentistry, AmeriCorps, Medical Teams International, and Greater Seattle Cares in a unique partnership of organizations that enables students to offer free dental services to people experiencing homelessness in city sanctioned homeless encampments in the Puget Sound area. Through monthly outreach clinics, HHB offers both friendship and continuity of care to the individuals it serves.

In addition to improving the health of the local homeless population, HHB engages dental students in immersive volunteer efforts. At each outreach clinic, camp residents give students an inside tour of the tent city and share their experiences. These interactions allow students to cultivate a better understanding of the challenges faced by the homeless in everyday life, especially in regard to oral and dental health. Latimer and Hwang believe that HHB outreach clinics provide much needed dental care to minority and underserved communities, while raising awareness about homelessness and health inequity among students.

Hwang and Latimer have contributed to our communities and truly listened to Dr. King’s call to action: Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in. These students strive each day to make this dream possible.

UW dental students Marcus Hwang and Jessica Latimer, who are serving on projects for the Timothy A. DeRouen Center for Global Oral Health, have been recognized for their exceptional academic achievement and community service.
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Hwang, who studied biochemistry at the UW before entering dental school, received the University of Washington Hall of Fame award as a co-founder of Husky Health Bridge, a student-led community service group that serves homeless people and others at risk. The award recognizes students who have made an outstanding contribution to the UW community.
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Latimer, who is also a Husky Health Bridge co-founder, received the 2016 UW Dental Class of 1951 Legacy Endowed Student Scholarship. This award recognizes students whose academic achievements, creative excellence, and outstanding performance at the School of Dentistry and at the University of Washington puts them at the top of their class.
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When the university hosted Tent City 3 for homeless people, Hwang helped lead dental students in creating two on-site clinics for the camp residents. Within a year, his humanitarian organization has established monthly dental care for Tent City 3 residents and expanded access to dental services for homeless people in the Seattle area.​
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“Winning the University of Washington Hall of Fame Award was unexpected,” Hwang said. “I grew up feeling like I had to struggle to achieve something, but I didn’t feel like that for this award. I simply worked consistently for something that I believed in: that people with more privilege had more responsibility to try to find solutions to problems in the world. I felt a sense of relief that this cause was recognized.”
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Hwang is also a recipient of the 2016 Ray Chalmers Endowed Scholarship at the School of Dentistry.​
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Latimer, another UW graduate, received her BS in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology in 2014. She is especially committed to developing access to health care for underserved communities.
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“Having grown up in Yakima, Washington, I have met many hard-working people who struggle to make ends meet, let alone obtain health care services,” she said. “I believe all people have a right to good health, and I intend to work for this right throughout my professional career.”​
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With Husky Health Bridge, she has served as director of relief efforts. She is also an active member of the Hispanic Student Dental Association and a regular volunteer at the Seattle Union Gospel Mission.
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“I work with a fantastic team of enthusiastic and compassionate students. I cannot be prouder of them,” said Dr. Ana Lucia Seminario, director of the DeRouen Center, who mentors both students. They are also her research assistants.

Dr. Ana Lucia Seminario is the recipient of the 2017 Sunstar Americas, Inc. Research Prevention in Oral Health Award for her team’s research proposal titled “Integrating oral health into the pediatric HIV care continuum: Baseline data of oral and systemic inflammation.” This award will provide a $25,000 grant to support the research project, which seeks to find the association between oral health manifestations in Kenyan children with HIV to advocate for an oral health program in Kenya.
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The project will be incorporated into the Kenyan Pediatric Studies, a National Institutes of Health-funded series of R01 grants for collaborative HIV research by the University of Washington and the University of Nairobi. Dr. Seminario believes that by “researching in oral health prevention we are investing in our general health” and improving the quality of life of many underserved populations.
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​Dr. Seminario will be principal investigator of the project, whose team includes:

• Dr. Jennifer Slyker, Assistant Professor of the UW Department of Global Health
• Dr. Dalton Wamalwa, Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Child Health at the University of Nairobi
• Dr. Arthur Kemoli, University of Nairobi Chair of Pediatric Dentistry & Orthodontics
• Dr. Georgios Kotsakis, Assistant Professor of the Department of Periodontics
• Dr. Sarah Benki-Nugent, microbiologist and epidemiologist
• Dr. Brandon Guthrie, Assistant Professor in the UW Department of Global Health
• Dr. Eduardo Bernabe, epidemiologist at the King’s College London
• Daisy Chebet, research nurse
• Marcus Hwang, UW dental student

The Sunstar award encourages interdisciplinary collaborative research projects centered on preventive dentistry and focusing on oral complications of systemic diseases; dental caries prevention; periodontal health; social, economic, and behaviorial aspects of preventive dentistry; and more.
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The Timothy A. DeRouen Center for Global Oral Health aims to improve communities’ health by including an oral health component in UW projects worldwide through research and scientific discoveries.

The Timothy A. DeRouen Center for Global Oral Health is one of five recipients of the UW Population Health Initiative Grant, which is awarded to pilot research projects to advance the health, community strength, and future development of populations. The DeRouen Center will collaborate with the UW schools and departments of landscape architecture, nursing, engineering, epidemiology, and global health to develop InterACTION Labs, an interdisciplinary built environment-community health program that will work with residents of the Claverito community in Iquitos, one of Peru’s five largest cities.

The Amazon River community of Claverito models an area where the environment and health conditions are interlinked. Our role in this project will be to study the microbiomes of children and adults in the region. Dr. Ana Lucia Seminario and UW dental student Belle Chen will travel there in 2018 to collect saliva samples for analysis by Drs. Georgios Kotsakis and Jeff McLean and gather information about how oral health affects Claverito residents’ quality of life. From this research, we hope to develop interventions that will improve the community’s oral health.
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Our UW partners include:

• Sarah Gimbel, BSN, PhD, MPH-Family and Child Nursing
• Rebecca Newmann, PhD-Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Peter Rabinowitz, MD, MPH-Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences
• Ben Spencer, MArch, MLA-Landscape Architecture

Dean James Johnson has announced the official launch of the Timothy A. DeRouen Center for Global Oral Health. He commemorated the notice by highlighting Dr. DeRouen’s significant achievements and everlasting contributions to our School of Dentistry. Dr. Ana Lucia Seminario, Assistant Professor of Pediatric Dentistry and Adjunct Faculty of Global Health, will now direct the center with Dr. DeRouen remaining as the Chair of the Board of Directors. The DeRouen Center’s current line of research focuses on sites in Peru, Kenya, and Thailand, projects ranging from correlations between oral health and systemic disease to the impact of landscape and environment on oral and gut microbiome. This is an exciting development for our Center and for the UW School of Dentistry.