A UF student is working to make cavities a little less troublesome.
Andres Alvarez, a first-year dental student, said he will begin his award-winning research project on a new dental adhesive on Wednesday.
Alvarez, 24, was named the recipient of the 2015 Dr. Ray Bowen Student Research Award from the American Dental Association Foundation and the Academy of Operative Dentistry at the end of February. Alvarez wrote in an email that he was chosen out of 12 finalists from around the nation.
The award will fund the project to develop a dental adhesive that will prevent cavities from forming between teeth and cavity fillings.
He received $6,000 for his research and an additional $1,000 to propose it to the Academy of Operative Dentistry in Chicago in February 2016.
“This award has given my research team and I the confidence to continue this research,” Alvarez wrote.
He and his team wanted to create a project that would combine Alvarez’s background in microbiology with operative dentistry and biomedical science.
Marcelle Nascimento, Alvarez’s project mentor and an assistant professor at the UF Operative Dentistry Division in the Department of Restorative Dental Sciences, wrote in an email it’s a promising project that will reduce the need for filling replacements.
Alvarez was paired with Nascimento for a dentistry college summer research program offered to first-year students interested in dental research. During this time, he developed a research project studying bacteria production and cavity prevention in children. He presented this research March 14 at the International Dental Research Association meeting in Boston and won two student awards.
“He is a very bright and dedicated student,” Nascimento wrote. “He has a great future in dentistry.”
[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 3/30/2015 under the headline “UF student awarded for cavity research”]
