AA-002 - Advancing Minority Dental Alumni Engagement Among Predoctoral Training Programs

With increasing costs of dental education, underrepresented dental students are faced with financial constraints. Scholarships designated for minority students are limited and the financial student debt can be astronomically excessive. In addition to costs, there remains a paucity of underrepresented minority dental faculty to serve as mentors and leaders in the pre-doctoral clinical and teaching settings.  Therefore, we examined minority dental alumni engagement and strategies to address these challenges.  This seminar will explore barriers and facilitators among minority dental alumni engagement for the purpose of advancing scholarship development and prioritizing solutions for the educational training of minority pre-doctoral dental students.