Category: News

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.