Year One

Dental Anatomy and Morphology is the first course in your preclinical education continuum. In this course, you obtain the knowledge and skills that serve as the foundation of both your preclinical and clinical education. Through interactive classroom and laboratory sessions, you learn about the healthy oral cavity and the anatomy, morphology, and occlusion of the primary and permanent dentition. In addition, you begin to learn fundamental concepts of clinical dentistry and practice what you have learned in the clinical setting.

The goal of Clinical Gross Anatomy is to teach you the knowledge and language of anatomy necessary to practice medicine—including dental medicine within a whole-body context—and facilitate discussion of problems and medical findings between colleagues. Anatomy is taught using different modalities that emphasize concepts, not memorization of facts, as well as an appreciation of the association between structure and function. In this course you encounter your first patient and work as part of your first professional team. Examination of your patient by the process of dissection is your primary learning resource.

Structures are identified based on characteristics such as their source, target, attachments, and/or relationship with other structures, not by rote. Teams of four students actively learn anatomy through dissection, discussion of clinical cases, palpation, and examination of prosecuted materials, radiographs, and cross-sectional images. Anatomy faculty both give lectures designed to emphasize concepts, structure, and function and join you in the laboratory to offer individualized assistance in performing and understanding of the day's dissection.

Clinicians are involved both within and outside the dissection laboratory. They reinforce your understanding of anatomy through radiology, surgery, and clinical procedures. By the end of the course, students are empowered to analyze, synthesize, and apply clinically relevant anatomical information to the development of a clinical diagnosis essential for good patient care.

Individual performance of regional dissections of the body by each student is required. Lectures stress functional interpretation and clinical correlation, and correlation of developmental anatomy with gross anatomy.

In Molecular Mechanisms, you begin to learn about the processes that generate, regulate, and conversely damage the various cell types that make up the organs of our body. The class emphasizes the common elements that are shared by different organs — first the cells, then their aggregates, the “tissues,” and finally how they come together to form the various organs of the body. In subsequent courses you apply these principles to specific organs. The course is composed of five units:

• Biomolecules and Cells is focused on the components of a stereotypical cell, including its chemical components, some of its critical metabolic pathways, and its subcellular compartments, the organelles, and their membranes.
• Healthy and Diseased Tissues focuses on the “tissues,” which are populations of cells of similar types that form communities by using cellular adhesion or other coupling mechanisms. This section rapidly turns to what happens when a tissue expresses a disease.
• Basic Pharmacology applies knowledge learned in the first two sections to more complex situations including the mechanisms of drug delivery to tissues and the mechanisms by which the drugs interact with the tissues’ signal transduction mechanisms.
• Basic Developmental Biology starts at the beginning from ES cells and describes cell-to-cell signaling mechanisms that generate the body plan and its tissues. These mechanisms focus on the earliest events in tissue identity starting with early embryonic development.
• Basic Genomics homes in on the basic architecture of the genome, the mechanisms of disease related to mutations, translocations, copy number variations, and aspects of gene therapy.

Each section of the course is highlighted by frequent small groups that include problem solving sessions, histological and pathological laboratories, and a journal club, where you and your fellow students debate the meaning of data in classical articles. Lastly, patients are presented whose life stories illustrate a cellular process under discussion.

Preclinical Operative Dentistry is the second course in your preclinical education continuum. Now that you have foundational knowledge related to the healthy oral cavity, you learn how to maintain this state in a patient through disease prevention and risk assessment. In addition, you learn how to identify, diagnose, and treat mild to moderate dental pathology. Through interactive classroom, laboratory, and clinic sessions, you continue to gain the fundamental skills needed for both your pre-clinical and clinical education.

*See Preclinical Operative Dentistry

The course consists of lectures and small groups for discussion and interviewing patients. You are introduced to the concepts of depression and psychosis. The class covers the major psychiatric syndromes, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, and personality disorders. You also learn about normal child and adult psychological development. Principles of psychiatric treatment are introduced and psychiatric patients are interviewed in small groups.

The purpose of this course is to help students develop the “non-clinical” professional skills that are key to successful dental practice. The course is designed as a thread through all four years of dental school. Each semester focuses on elements of professional development that are relevant to your current educational stage. The focus of the first semester is helping you transition to the new dental school environment by providing them with tools for personal wellness and educational success.

The Body In Health and Disease I begins in January of your first year and continues until June. This is a multidisciplinary course, which incorporates aspects of embryology, histology, pathology, pathophysiology, and therapeutics. Through this course, you and your fellow students gain a working understanding of:

• Normal organ development, structure, and function
• Changes in organ structure and function with disease processes
• Approaches to therapy including use of pharmaceutical agents

The course also provides opportunity to demonstrate the ability to work collaboratively, apply knowledge, and solve clinical problems. Instructional methods include lectures to provide the core knowledge, case-based small group discussions, team-based learning exercises, and independent readings. The course structure and content is closely related to the curriculum of the concurrent courses: Foundations in Clinical Medicine and Psychiatric Medicine. The course has ten sections taught over the spring and fall of your second and third semesters of enrollment:

• Microbiology/infectious diseases
• Basic immunology
• Cardiovascular system
• Pulmonary system
• Renal/urinary tract
• Endocrinology/reproduction
• Neurosciences
• Gastrointestinal tract/liver
• Hematology/oncology
• Rheumatology/musculoskeletal