The Dental Handoff

Dr. McAllister Castelaz started college as a nutrition major headed for medicine. A research project with a dental student changed her direction. After a hospital residency and years in federally qualified health centers, she earned a Master of Dental Public Health. Today she is a dental clinical policy consultant supporting Wisconsin Medicaid and a supervisory dentist with Blackhawk Technical Col...

Dr. Charles Schlesinger never planned on dentistry. He tried research, taught high school, and only applied to dental school after a family member who was an endodontist suggested it. Thirty years later, he had owned a practice, taught implant surgery for implant companies, served as COO of an implant company, and moved into clinical development for a bone grafting company. In this episode of The...

Researcher and author Susan Wingrove spent part of this summer catching up with colleagues in Milan and Norway. She came back with news for hygienists: a hygiene-driven treatment for peri-implant mucositis and early peri-implantitis is already in use in Europe. Until now, she says, hygienists have had to refer these patients. She hopes the treatment reaches the US and Canada later this fall, or by...

Anyone who has coordinated a dental hygiene clinic knows how much time goes into clinical competency tracking, chasing down students and pulling records together for accreditation. Sara Taft, the dental hygiene program director at Waukesha County Technical College, spent three to four hours a week on that tracking as a second-year clinical coordinator. As workload hours went down and enrollment we...

Emme Sanders, RDH has spent more than 30 years in dental hygiene as a clinician, speaker, executive coach, and writer. She is the author of “Welcome to Work: Inspiring Positive Change in the Workplace” and, with Lois Banta and Dana Watson, co-founder of COLLABricon, a two-day team-synergy summit for entire dental teams. In this episode of The Dental Handoff, Dr. Kelly Tanner and Emme talk about th...

After doing well on her national board exam, Kathryn Gilliam was invited into the next dental class. She decided not to go. Looking back, she says she would change that, and that she would have her own dental hygiene practice if she were starting over. She built a career in dental hygiene instead, with decades in clinical care and a coaching career that grew alongside it. In this episode of The De...

Wendy Bebey's first job out of dental hygiene school didn't sit right with her, from how instruments were handled to whether the role was helping her grow, and she knew it. So she left, and started a path that would eventually take her from clinical hygiene into more than 20 years across Professional Relations, Sales Management, and continuing education at companies like Procter & Gamble, HuFr...

Debora Carrier, RDH, spent more than 30 years in the dental industry as a hygienist and CPR instructor. She got into hygiene school at 17, after a guidance counselor told her she never would, and left as the youngest person ever to sit the state boards in Illinois. She built a parallel runway modeling career alongside hygiene, co-founded The CPR Sisters with her own sister 31 years ago, and starte...

Michael Cembrola spent more than 20 years on the payer side of dental insurance, including six years running the national sales team for Delta Dental of California and all their affiliated states. He has been inside FBI investigations into dental fraud. He has sat in rooms where insurance companies decided which new technologies, they would not cover. And he has watched the gap between carriers an...

Howard Farran, DDS, MBA, MAGD, built Dentaltown in 1999 because he believed no dentist should ever have to practice alone. Since then, he has grown it to 250,000 plus members in 43 countries, hosted 1,700 plus episodes of Dentistry Uncensored, lectured in 50 countries, and written Uncomplicate Business: All It Takes Is People, Time and Money.   In this episode of The Dental Handoff, Dr. Kelly Tann...

Dr. Shahin Safarian, DMD, MBA, graduated from Tufts School of Dental Medicine in 2001 with $400,000 in debt. By 2008 he had three locations and $2 million in debt. He pressed restart. Today his practice is 800 square feet, one operatory, powered by AI, and running on $30,000 a month in overhead.   Before dentistry, he was a professional soccer player for the Puebla F.C.A.s and the San Diego Socker...

Dr. Jay Neugarten, DDS, MD, FACS, is a world-renowned oral and maxillofacial surgeon who was class valedictorian at Columbia University College of Dental Medicine, earned his medical degree from Stony Brook, and completed his OMFS residency at Long Island Jewish. He is the Managing Partner and Medical Director of the New York Center for Orthognathic and Maxillofacial Surgery, an associate clinical...

It is much easier to destroy tooth structure than to conserve it. In this episode of The Dental Handoff, Dr. Michael Morgan, DDS, shares the minimally invasive and direct composite philosophy that has shaped 25 years of his clinical work. Dr. Morgan explains his “add first, subtract second” approach, why preserving natural tooth structure can keep future treatment options open, and how he applies...

What separates a thriving dental practice from one that's simply staying busy? According to Kelly Fox-Galvagni, CEO of Smile Potential, the answer often isn't clinical skill, it’s leadership, accountability, and the willingness to address difficult conversations before they become expensive problems. With more than 30 years in dentistry, Kelly has helped practice owners improve profitability, stre...

Dr. Joy Void-Holmes, DHSc, RDH, got her start in dentistry at 16, answering phones at her dentist's office through the Marion Barry DC summer youth employment program. She watched how the practice ran, learned the front desk, and eventually went to Howard University for dental hygiene after a conversation with a security guard and a dentist who told her to try hygiene first.   She is now the creat...

Joshua Austin, DDS, MAGD, is a national lecturer, Editorial Director at Dental Economics, and a full-time restorative dentist in San Antonio, Texas. He is also the son of a dentist who passed away in 1990 when Josh was 10, and who he thinks about every single day he walks into his operatory.   In this episode of The Dental Handoff, Dr. Kelly Tanner sits down with Josh to talk about how restorative...

Dr. Syeda Andaleeb Zaidi is a prosthodontist who built a dental marketing agency from a single Facebook post in 2017 and then added an AI layer to it after getting an automated reminder call mid-procedure while her hand was in a patient's mouth.   She is the founder of Techie Dentist, a dental marketing agency based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and HASI, an AI-powered patient engagement system that ha...

Tammy Reavis, RDH, MPH, has spent her career stuck in what she calls a piston feeling. Chairside in periodontics, she can get gum disease under control, but she cannot touch the diabetes, the high blood pressure, or the chronic inflammation sitting underneath it. So, she went and built the second half of her career around fixing exactly that.   Tammy completed a year-long program through the Funct...

Most hygienist career transitions start with burnout and end with uncertainty. Tiffany Bairos, RDH, MPH, took a different path. After 18 years in clinical hygiene, a combination of physical wear, a research certificate, a temp job, a full-time leap, and a master's in public health brought her to a faculty role she had not planned and could not have mapped.   She now teaches caries risk assessment...

Global dental hygiene is a growing profession recognized in over 30 countries. Germany is not one of them. Anyone can use the title. Anyone can claim it. And a six-hour course can technically qualify an assistant to scale subgingivally.   Carmen Lanoway, RDH, BScDH, has practiced inside that system for most of her 38-year career. She is currently Secretary of the International Federation of Dental...

Barbara Tritz returns to The Dental Handoff to discuss the powerful connection between hormones and oral health. Women with excellent oral hygiene are developing sensitivity, dry mouth, bleeding gums, tooth decay, and bone loss. Barbara explains why the answer is often not brushing harder but understanding what is happening biologically inside the body. Subscribe to The Dental Handoff on Apple Pod...

There is a version of dental hygiene most hygienists never encounter. No production targets. No same-day schedule pressure. Care measured by how many lives you reach, not how many patients fit in the hour.   Jessica L. Woods, MPH, RDH has been living that version for over a decade. A clinician who spent years in public health and alternative practice settings, she was the first hygienist employed...

In this episode of The Dental Handoff, Dr. Kelly Tanner sits down with Dr. Derik J. Sven, DHSc, RDH, CDT. He is a doctoral researcher, 2025 to 2026 VDHA President, ADHA Fellow, and one of the most clear-eyed voices on hygiene workforce policy in the profession today.   Dr. Sven's perspective is genuinely rare. He grew up in a dental laboratory, pursued a seminary education, was rejected from one h...

In this episode of The Dental Handoff, Dr. Kelly Tanner sits down with Mary Govoni, CDA, RDA, RDH OSHA Outreach Trainer, Speaker, Author, a compliance consultant who has spent decades helping dental practices close the gap between what they think they are doing and what their documentation actually shows.   Mary walks through what she finds in practice after practice: the workaround mindset that c...

Every clinical role in a dental practice comes with a license, a certification, or an advanced degree. The office manager who coordinates everything those clinicians do? She learns it on the job, alone, and owns the outcome regardless.   In this episode of The Dental Handoff, Dr. Kelly Tanner sits down with Savanah Carlson, MAADOM, Director of U.S. Partners and Learning Programs at MaxAssist, form...