Ostrow Professor of Clinical Dentistry Jane Forrest has been named the winner of the Accomplished Faculty Award by the American Dental Association and the American Association for Dental Research.

The prestigious award is meant to acknowledge Forrest for her national leadership of and sustained contributions to education, research and application of evidence-based decision making to dentistry.

Forrest will be officially presented the award at the ADA’s Evidence-Based Dentistry (EBD) Awards, taking place Oct. 19 in Atlanta.

“I believe that Dr. Forrest is very deserving of this award,” Ostrow Dean Avishai Sadan MBA ’14 said in his nomination letter to the award selection committee. “She has distinguished herself as a leader who has made … significant contributions to the development of new resources and to the advancement of EBD here at USC and throughout the global dental academic and practitioner communities.”

Evidence-based decision-making (EBDM) is a patient care model that synthesizes the latest scientific evidence with a dental practitioner’s expertise and the patient’s values to guide decision-making in the dental chair.

Advancing dental education

Forrest has devoted her nearly 40-year career to advancing dental education overall, training dental hygiene, dental and international dentistry students as well as advanced specialty residents at Ostrow and across the nation.

She earned her dental hygiene degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University, her master’s degree from Boston University and her doctor of education degree from Nova Southeastern University.

Forrest is a national leader in developing evidence-based decision-making resources for academics and practitioners, having authored two of the only textbooks devoted to evidence-based decision-making, Evidence-Based Decision-Making: A Translational Guide for Dental Professionals and EBDM in Action: Developing Competence in EB Practice.

She has also published more than 25 EBDM articles, written chapters on EBDM for dental textbooks and was one of the authors of the American Dental Hygiene Association’s White Paper on Evidence-Based Decision-Making in Dental Hygiene Practice, Education and Research.

Forrest was one of the first recipients of the ADHA/Warner Lambert Award for Professional Excellence in Dental Hygiene and a recipient of the Oral/Dental Hygiene Researcher Award presented by the Oral Health Research Group of the International Association for Dental Research.

Ostrow’s EBDM champion

Forrest joined Ostrow as a full-time faculty member in 1999.

She is the chair of the Section of Behavioral Sciences and Practice Management in the Division of Public Health & Pediatric Dentistry.

For the past seven years, she has served as chair for Ostrow’s curriculum committee and has been instrumental in facilitating the review, approval and implementation of new programs as well as existing curricula.

She also mentors students, residents and faculty members on how EBDM can be integrated into the everyday practice of dentistry.

Forrest serves as director of the National Center for Dental Hygiene Research and Practice, an organization that provides direction to dental hygienists on priority research areas to help advance the profession.

As part of her work with the National Center, she has sponsored four dental hygiene research conferences to bring together the world’s dental hygienists to share their research, explore commonalities and foster future collaborations.

“We are really fortunate to have Jane here at Ostrow,” Sadan said. “She has been a terrific source of EBDM information that only serves to strengthen the science behind what we do in the clinic, which ultimately makes every Ostrow student all that much better as they head out into the workforce.”