Chester W. Douglass, DMD, PhD

Dr. Chester Douglass received his DMD from Temple University in 1965 and a PhD from the University of Michigan School of Public Health in 1971. He has published more than 140 papers in refereed journals covering a variety of topics in health policy, oral epidemiology and dental public health, in which he is a boarded specialist. He served as principal investigator in the New England Elders Dental study, which produced 19 important papers on the epidemiology of dental diseases in the elderly.

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 a 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 chair of the board of trustees of the Medical Foundation, and current chair of the DentaQuest Foundation board of directors. 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, 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 served as chair of the Department of Oral Health Policy and Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine from 1978 to 2008.