Smart Smiles to Grow
SDM’s Ana Zea will help expand the Smart Smiles program this fall.
Smart Smiles, based at the Goldman School of Dental Medicine, is a preventive dental program for underinsured children. This fall, Ana Zea, Smart Smiles coordinator, will help to expand the program’s outreach.
Zea worked with second- and third-grade classes in Boston public schools last semester. This fall, she and other SDM staff members and students will expand the Smart Smiles outreach to elementary school classes in an as-yet undetermined number of the city’s 25 public schools. Exact plans are still in the works.
“I’m looking forward to the big expansion in the number of children,” says Zea, who will also become an SDM clinical instructor in September, “and to continuing to make a difference.” Smart Smiles workers educate children on the proper way to brush and floss their teeth, and they provide dental screenings, as well as fluoride and sealants when necessary.
The Oral Health Foundation funds the program.
“I’m very excited to be back practicing dentistry,” says Zea, who previously worked in the division of community health programs at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Chelsea Healthcare Center. She earned a D.D.S. from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1996.
Rebecca McNamara can be reached at ramc@bu.edu.