Jennifer Perkins, DDS, MD, Resident Alum : Envisioning a more humane dentistry education

Going dental 

Perkins spends part of her working hours immersed in her clinical practice as an oral and maxillofacial surgeon, focused on caring for head and neck cancer patients after radiation. She loves the work, especially expanding access to high-quality care. But the majority of her time is dedicated to transforming dental education at UCSF. Dental students, unlike medical students, aren’t required to do a residency, so in just four years, they need to acquire both the knowledge and the hand skills to do delicate microsurgery. “You have to take them from point A to a distant point B quickly and support them along the way,” she says. 

Student teachers  

Her mission to humanize dental education leads Perkins down many pedagogical pathways. She is leading a faculty team in revising the School of Dentistry’s predoctoral curriculum, incorporating more interactive learning, shadowing, and lessons on bedside manner. She is the director of the clinical oral surgery courses for dental students. And she is an award-winning instructor, teaching classes on the basics, like physiology, to the more specialized, like the administration of local anesthesia. The question that always guides her in such efforts, she says, is “How can we use our curricular time to help breed the inquisitiveness, the self-directed learning, the resilience, the curiosity to go in whatever direction the field takes them?”  

Shoulders to stand on 

“The largest driver of my wanting to be in dental education is that I didn’t particularly enjoy my own dentistry training,” says Perkins, a first-generation college student. “I went into health care because I wanted to help people, and my time in dental school didn’t really help me sustain that desire. Trying not to grind that out of students is really important for their well-being and for furthering everything they’re capable of doing.” 

– Kira Goldenberg for UCSF Magazine