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  • Allan Formicola:Building Bridges for Community-Based Oral Health Care in Underserved Communities
  • Almyra Ayos (bio) and Marguerite Ro (bio)

As Allan Formicola recounts his career and the trajectory that led him to his current position as Vice Dean of Columbia University's Center for Community Health Partnerships (CCHP), it becomes evident that he is passionate about the health and well-being of people in medically underserved communities. He has been a relentless champion and a visionary for improving oral health care service delivery in Washington Heights and Harlem, two communities of color whose members are at high risk for oral disease. Yet he sees his role as a leader and an academic not as one man's accomplishments but as a single, if vital, thread in the tapestry of humanity and community we all belong to. He uses words such as creativity and problem-solving to describe the tasks of his chosen vocation. The roads taken in his illustrious career have brought him in touch with the oral health practitioner, the legislator, the academic, the dental student, the patient, the everyman.

Dr. Allan Formicola's groundbreaking work has been in the areas of community-based dental services and diversification of the oral health workforce. The Community DentCare Network that formalizes the academic-community partnership between the Columbia University School of Dental and Oral Surgery and northern Manhattan is just one example of how he has realized his vision of oral health, moving dentistry and dentists from standard, conventional practice to addressing oral health through community service and community engagement (locally and nationally) to alleviate the pandemic of health disparities in this country. His community-based efforts have served as the foundation for the W.K. Kellogg Community Voices Oral Health Campaign and the Robert Wood Johnson Dental Pipeline Initiative.

From Dreams of Bridges to Dreams of Dentistry

As a college student, Dr. Formicola initially decided to study civil engineering, aspiring to build bridges like the George Washington Bridge in upper Manhattan. As often happens to college students, he chose to change course mid-stream. A wise future brother-in-law suggested that civil engineering would limit his ample [End Page 1] creativity. Dentistry, however, was a great profession, something he could take in many directions. From there, Allan Formicola's path seems to have stretched inevitably to where he is today, although one might say he is still fulfilling a dream of building bridges.

Upon first attending dental school at Georgetown University, Dr. Formicola professes that he was not at all certain he would enjoy being a dentist, but did love his courses in the School of Dentistry. It was not until his 3rd year, working with patients, that he discovered his passion for dentistry, for taking a problem mouth with ear-to-ear-caries in the pre-prevention era of dental care, and fixing it. It was an early signal of his drive to target problems and solve them creatively. During the Vietnam era, as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy based in Pensacola, Florida, he spearheaded the development of the Navy's first ever Periodontal Specialist Treatment Facility.

Teaching as a Building Block

Dr. Formicola "fell in love with teaching" during a supplementary, temporary job teaching at Georgetown University while working in private practice, a passion that brought him to an important crossroads. In his next position as an Assistant Professor and Clinical Investigator for the Institute of Dental Research at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, Dr. Formicola had the chance to work in a premier academic oral health center. From there, at the young age of 29, he was appointed Chairman of the Department of Periodontics in the New Jersey Dental School at the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. As he climbed up the ranks in leadership, from Chairman to Associate Dean and then eventually to Acting Dean, he further realized that there was a larger role that he could play in addressing oral health by being an administrator shaping an academic dental institution, in addition to the important role of being an educator. More importantly, during this time he recognized the potential to institutionalize patient centered community based dentistry...

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