Chester Douglass, DMD, MPH, PhD

Dr. Douglass received his DMD from Temple University in 1965 and a PhD from University of Michigan, School of Public Health, in 1971. He has published over 140 papers in referred journals covering a variety of topics in health policy, oral epidemiology, and dental public health, in which he is a boarded specialist. He has served as Principal Investigator in the New England Elders Dental study which produce 19 important papers on the epidemiology of dental diseases in the elderly and he is currently Principal Investigator of the NIEHS funded case control study of fluoride and osteosarcoma. Dr. Douglass’s research also combines dental care policy and financing issues with oral epidemiology research. These studies have demonstrated the increase in need for dental care and decrease in the supply of dentists that will occur over the next 20 years.

He is an alumnus of the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellowship program, past president of the American Board of Dental Public Health, past Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Medical Foundation and current Chairman of the Board for the Massachusetts Delta Dental Oral Health Foundation. He has been a member of several national committees including the American Dental Association committee for the development of national board exams and the Institute of Medicine Committee on the Future of Dental Education. He was the Chief of Dentistry and Oral Surgery for the Cambridge Health Alliance for a number of years. Dr. Douglass served for 10 years as the Editor-in-Chief of the Oral Care Report which is a summary journal of advances in dentistry that is published quarterly with a distribution of 250,000 dentists in 49 countries in 14 languages. Dr. Douglass has served as Chairman of the Department of Oral Health Policy and Epidemiology at Harvard School of Dental Medicine from 1978 to 2008, and Professor in the Harvard School of Dental Medicine and the Harvard School of Public Health since.