Moving effortlessly between the clinic and the lab, Liu is the latest faculty addition to ensure scientific discoveries are translated into practice — one of the key goals laid out in the school’s 2026-2031 Strategic Vision.

WHEN BONE AUGMENTATION FAILS in the clinic, Associate Professor of Clinical Dentistry Wenwen Liu is not one to simply repair the damage and move on.

Ever inquisitive, the dyed-in-the-wool scientist takes the problem back to her lab to search for possible solutions.

Liu is a clinician-scientist, a practitioner who treats patients and conducts cutting-edge research, permitting the work in each context to influence the other. It is precisely the type of faculty member Ostrow aims to recruit and retain — as laid out in Ostrow’s 2026-2031 Strategic Vision — helping to ensure innovation and discoveries made in research laboratories are actually implemented during clinical care.

Better together

Liu could’ve selected a well-worn path to either patient care or research alone, but she chose to combine these passions intentionally.

“I chose both, because I equally love clinical practice and research,” Liu says. “The two fields complete each other.”

She has observed the discovery-implementation gap from both sides. During bone-augmentation procedures, Liu observed that different techniques were associated with different failure rates. The non-resorbable membranes used to guide new bone growth can become exposed, inviting infection and collapse, sending patients back for repeated care.

So, she carried the finding to the lab, where she engineers membranes that are more biocompatible and biologically responsive. Her work revolves around a quiet idea: Bone carries its own faint electrical charge, and injured bone loses it, so she designs materials that mimic and restore that charge to coax the body into rebuilding itself.

“Nature is the best scientist,” Liu says.

One approach she is developing allows for broken bones to be “recharged” from outside the body through a magnetic field, so a patient never needs a second surgery to replace it. The idea reached her through an unlikely channel.

“My inspiration actually came from watching Grey’s Anatomy,” Liu says, with a laugh. In the scene, physicians recharge a pacemaker without an incision.

“It sparked the idea, but I saw a bone membrane where the show writers had a pacemaker.”

The findings travel back the other way too. When her research on peri-implantitis showed that the distance between an implant crown and the implant influences long-term bone stability, it reinforced the importance of prosthetically driven implant planning and interdisciplinary collaboration.

In surgery, she emphasizes careful case selection, individualized treatment planning and the translation of clinical evidence into everyday patient care.

Impact is personal

She traces her instincts back to 2008. Liu was a dental student in Sichuan when the Wenchuan earthquake struck, and the most severely injured were airlifted to the hospital, where she volun-teered in the pediatric trauma ward, caring for children who had lost limbs. Among them was a 7-year-old girl whose family could not be found.

“Even now, thinking back on those children still brings me to tears,” Liu says.

The experience convinced her that applying existing knowledge was not enough. She wanted to create what did not yet exist.

Liu came to periodontics after training first as a prosthodontist, a turn that taught her how much she still had to learn, and she treats that lesson as the real curriculum. She has published more than two dozen papers and holds three patents, but what she most wants to pass to students is not any single technique.

“Knowledge changes,” she says. “What lasts is the habit of lifelong learning and the nerve to question everything, even the textbook.”

Ask her to define a successful career, and she does not reach for titles or awards. She measures it one person at a time.

“A patient who smiles again, a student who becomes a better clinician, a material that reaches someone and eases their pain,” Liu says. “Impact is personal before it is statistical.”