Working

As the director of the American Dental Association’s (ADA) Research Institute and the Center for Evidence-Based Dentistry (EBD), Julie Frantsve-Hawley, RDH, PhD, has the opportunity to fulfill her longtime goal of having a career that combines her dental background with her love of science.

Frantsve-Hawley started her dental hygiene career 19 years ago after working as a dental assistant in high school. “I always had a strong background in science and health care, so I knew I wanted to pursue that type of career, and in high school, I thought that dental hygiene would be a good start,” the Kenilworth, Ill. resident said. “I got into the program at [Harper College in Palatine, Ill.], and that’s where it all began.”

After working in private practice for four years, Frantsve-Hawley went on to get her bachelor’s degree in biology from Loyola University of Chicago, and her PhD in genetics at Harvard University.

“After that, I was employed as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California San Francisco, where I was studying angiogenesis, which is blood vessel formation,” she said. “Then I did a brief stint in the pharmaceutical industry helping companies discover new drugs for cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease [and other conditions]. At that point, I wanted to be in a position where I felt that I had a bigger impact. I really wanted to go back to dentistry and merge my science background with the dental background that I had. I also wanted a career path that would be involved in communicating science to different audiences.”

Frantsve-Hawley obtained her first position with ADA in 2004 as the assistant director for scientific information, which led to her current position in research in evidence-based dentistry. As director, she has many duties, which include overseeing the development and launch of the ADA’s EBD Web site (http://ebd.ada.org), and developing and launching key EBD educational initiatives, like the ADA Evidence Reviewer program and a weeklong intensive EBD course offered in collaboration with the Forsyth Institute in Boston. She also oversees the Clinical Recommendations Program, which provides evidence-based recommendations for practitioners to be used together with each practitioner’s professional judgment and experience in the context of the needs or informed preferences of the individual patient.

In addition to those and other responsibilities, she is director and primary investigator of the ADA’s Health Screening program.

“The health screening program is really a research program, and it’s been around for over 40 years,” she said. “The program has monitored the occupational health of the health care team and also addresses emerging issues; historically, the health screening program has been involved in identifying HBV as an occupational risk, and we’ve been monitoring exposure, noting that more members of the team are being vaccinated.”

Although Frantsve-Hawley has worked in the fields of research and science for the past 15 years, she said that her current position is still different from her previous experiences.

“First of all, I’m not providing any type of dental care to anybody, but there’s a huge amount of collaboration involved,” she said. “We collaborate with scientists all over the world with the Center for Evidence-Based Dentistry. With the health screening program, we’re collaborating with dentists and physicians, and then we’re collaborating with all members of the dental team in grassroots efforts. One of the biggest things I’ve seen is just the huge level of cooperation, and that’s one of the things I find most rewarding.”

The best aspect of her job, Frantsve-Hawley said, is being able to interact with so many different people and helping members of the dental team be better at what they already do. And as far as the future goes, she said that she doesn’t think she will go back to traditional private practice.

“I really love working here at the ADA,” she said. “I love the fact that what I do seems to impact people positively, and with evidence-based dentistry, there’s so much work to do. There are so many opportunities, so I’d like to stay here and help make things better, create more initiatives and resources and help educate people.

“There’s so much room for growth in EBD, and what I’m seeing through the initiatives that we have right now is a lot of interest in the profession and a thirst for more knowledge and more resources. [In the future], I see myself helping to leverage the knowledge I have and the teamwork that we have going on to try to meet some of those needs.”

Frantsve-Hawley advises anyone who wants a change in their career to do a little soul-searching in order to fulfill their goals.

“In my career, I’ve had several instances where I was at crossroads and felt that I wanted to do something a little bit different, and so my advice to anybody would be to think about the experiences and interests that you have and try to define goals and objectives that can meet your interests,” she said. “You’ll usually find something that really meets your needs. I said I wanted to be involved in merging my dental science background and my hygiene background with communicating about science. That was a very broad goal, but having that broad goal and knowing in my heart what I wanted to do helped me find this position at the ADA, so with a little bit of soul-searching, you can find something that really interests you.”

For more information, email frantsvej@ada.org.

This edition of Working was prepared by Frances Moffett.