Fundraising Priorities

UCLA School of Dentistry is dedicated to improving oral and systemic health of the people of California, the nation, and the world through education, research, patient care, and public service.

Gifts to these critical initiatives allow us to lead and transform how dentistry is taught and practiced. For more information, please contact Sarah Porter at (310) 206-6079 or sporter@support.ucla.edu.

The CBCE program addresses these inadequacies by allowing fourth year UCLA Dentistry students to provide treatment to underserved communities, while concurrently gaining vital experience as part of their journey towards becoming future leaders in oral health care. By traveling to partnering sites for six weeks of rotations throughout the academic year, students perform a wide array of services including patient education, cleanings, fillings, dentures, and extractions. Since the programs inception, Pediatric and Endodontic specialty residents have also begun to complete rotations, further increasing access to care for underserved communities.

Our outreach efforts are designed to augment the diversity of our own pre-doctoral student classes and also to increase the number of individuals in the dental school pipeline around the country. The reasons are clear; a more diverse group of practicing dentists will be better poised to meet the needs of a changing population. The School of Dentistry is committed to evolving and welcoming a diverse community of patients, students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends into the UCLA Dentistry family.

Our vision for the future is to lead and transform how dentistry is taught and practiced. The innovation created by iDDS will help us rapidly expand collaborations among academia, the dental community, and industry. Ultimately, iDDS will diversify the UCLA Dentistry’s patient care, education, and research portfolio.

UCLA’s vision is to scale up our renowned Special Patient Care Clinic into a Special Patient Care Center (SPCC) to provide superb patient care, premier education, and clinical research.  The Center will treat special needs patients in a multidisciplinary, highly collaborative environment, with the latest technological advances in oral health care.  Our goal is to pioneer the treatment of this extremely underserved population and set the standard in training oral health care to students, residents and future educational leaders.

As state support has decreased substantially over the years and tuition continues to increase, providing scholarship support to future dentists is among our top priorities. Scholarships help students defray educational expenses, ensuring that the broad array of professional options – including teaching, research, and practice in underserved communities – remains open to each student upon graduation.