Brenda Heaton, PhD, MPH

Brenda Heaton, PhD, MPH is an Associate Professor jointly appointed in the Department of Health Policy and Health Services Research at the Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine and the Department of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health, Boston University. Her research interests include a focus on the social production of oral health, with an overall goal of addressing the complex mechanisms responsible for the emergence of oral health disparities. In support of these interests, she is the principal investigator on four currently active research grants from the NIDCR, including two 5-year R01 research grant awards aimed at studying the potential role of caregivers' social networks, including network-based interventions, in mitigating social disparities in oral health among young children. In addition to mapping and generating social network data, this work includes the development of dynamic computational models that facilitate experimental simulations of hypothetical public health interventions. Heaton also maintains scholarship and collaborations in the area of periodontal disease with interests in the validity of clinical and self-report measures for population-level research and in the potential for causal associations between periodontal disease and other chronic disease outcomes, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and perinatal outcomes.

Brenda Heaton has a wide range of experience conducting oral health research among less advantaged and minority populations, particularly residents of public housing, in her role as a co-investigator with the Center for Research to Evaluate and Eliminate Dental Disparities (www.creedd.org). She has also worked with American Indian/Alaska Native populations in addressing Early Childhood Caries through NIDCR-funded work with the California Tribal Epidemiology Center (CTEC). She maintains collaborations with the Black Women's Health Study to study predictors and consequences of poor oral health among this cohort.

She serves as a faculty member in the Dental Public Health postgraduate and residency program at the Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine, has been a faculty research fellow at the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing & Computational Sciences and Engineering, and leads the Hariri-funded Focused Research Program in Simulation Modeling for Population Health (FY 2022). She is an active member of the Behavioral, Epidemiology and Health Services Research Scientific Group of the International Association for Dental Research and is completing a three-year term as an elected member of the Board of Directors for the American Association for Dental, Oral and Craniofacial Research.