Snapshots

He’s graduating with the fall class of 2019, but Trevor Thang DDS, MSc OMFR, is very happy to be heading straight back to school — this time, as a tenure track professor. In September, Thang began a new position as assistant professor at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at Western University, where he’s the sole specialist in oral and maxillofacial radiology.

Meet Arlington Franklin Dungy, one of Ontario's first Black DDS graduates, from the Class of 5T6 — and a leader who had a profound impact on diversity in medical school admissions. 

Walking through the bustling pathways between dental units in the Children’s Clinic, 94 year-old Dr. Erik Langenholt, class of 6T5, recalls his first patient. “He was twelve years old and for him, dentists were not ‘top drawer,’” the spry nonagenarian says with a grin. “He sprang up from the chair and made a run for it.”

By the time he was running down his young patient through the hallways of the Elm Street building it had been open for just four years. Langenholt had been in Canada for a mere 13. Dentistry would be his second profession, and one that he came to through an accident of fate.

When Frank Kalamut 7T9 speaks about the Faculty of Dentistry, his wife Doris will make additional comments—just in case something has been left out. Two years shy from their ruby wedding anniversary, the couple, having met at Robart’s library as students in 1976, speak very much as one… especially when the subject in question is the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Don Coburn 5T1 had likely not yet practiced on one of the first fully reclining lounge chairs when Ronald Cox sat down as a patient in the 1960s. Cox was a mechanical engineer by trade, and as he and Coburn navigated the dance that is patient and dentist, they also got to talking about how to make that dance more efficient. It was a conversation that soon led to a revolution in ergonomic dentistry design.