Alumna and Restorative Dentistry’s New Vice Chair Yousef Sets Herself and Department High Goals

Associate professor of restorative dentistry Hoda Yousef has been selected as the new vice chair of the school’s largest department. She is an alumna of Rutgers School of Dental Medicine (RSDM) and has been a full-time faculty member since 1998.

“I feel like this is my second home,” she said. “ I've seen it grow and I've seen it change and I've seen it change for the better; I’m proud to be a part of this.”

Prior to this role, Yousef was the past president of the New Jersey section of American College of Prosthodontists, the chairman of faculty affairs, and president of the academic assembly. As the vice chair, she hopes to help introduce new programs and courses, improve the department’s existing curriculum, and ensure that students graduate with the fulfillment that they got the best education like she herself felt.

At RSDM, students are introduced to various specialties and perform numerous procedures. “The number of requirements for our students outweighs other universities,” she said. “Students graduate extracting more teeth, doing more dentures or removable prostheses than any other school.  … We are one of the few schools that allow clinical treatment of implant patients on which  our implant competencies are completed.” 

Now an enthusiastic prosthodontist and educator, Yousef stumbled upon the profession.

For as long as she can remember, she wanted to be a health care provider. First, she thought of medicine but decided it wasn’t the right fit after a year of medical school in her motherland, Egypt. As she explored her options, she learned one of her Rutgers classmates was entering dental school.

“I said, dentistry? At that time, I was almost 21 and I had never been to a dentist because I had good teeth,” she said. So, her first dentist visit became to learn more about the job. “It seemed like such a nice profession, and I would be helping people in a different aspect. So, I went into dentistry blindly.”

But once she started, she began loving it. A born perfectionist, she immediately connected with prosthodontics, where perfection is an immanent property of the specialty. She finished her DMD in 1991 and completed her prosthodontics specialty along with a master’s in oral biology a few years later. Following the program, she first was a part-time faculty member and then became full-time in 1998 when her mentor and idol Dr. William Nicholas was preparing to retire.

“When they asked me to take over his course, it was like getting the Nobel Prize,” said Yousef, who is one of the few board-certified prosthodontists at RSDM. “He was a general dentist and taught prosthodontics in the Restorative Department to the caliber of the best prosthodontists.” Nicholas’s courses had piqued Yousef’s interest in the discipline, which she says, “has been my calling.”