Doctors on the horizon: U of T Dentistry graduates eight PhD students in fall 2025
By Diane Peters
This record cohort made important oral and whole-body health discoveries
At fall convocation, the Faculty of Dentistry will celebrate one of the largest groups of PhD candidates ever to graduate, with eight students successfully defending their theses in recent months.
Considering the Faculty takes in roughly four or so new PhD students throughout any given calendar year, it’s a unique class. (The Faculty currently has 23 students working on their PhDs.)
“This group of graduates is very special,” says Dentistry professor Laurent Bozec, associate dean of graduate education. He says this is the last of the Covid-19 pandemic cohorts, with many of these students embarking on graduate studies during shutdowns.
"The mouth is literally the shopping window of our body and all facets of medical science have an outlet inside the mouth"
“Here we have graduate students that are extremely resilient, that went through one of the worst times in research environment history,” says Bozec.
They’re also notable for illustrating that dentistry research has far-reaching impact in both oral and overall health.
“The mouth is literally the shopping window of our body and all facets of medical science have an outlet inside the mouth,” says Bozec, who himself is a physicist and recruits his graduate studies from an array of backgrounds. Research in dental faculties can touch on biomaterials, immunology, infections, cardiac and brain health, and more.
One impressive fall 2025 PhD graduate, Imran Farooq, made a brand-new discovery regarding loss of bone that supports teeth and Lyme disease.
“Everyone who talks about Lyme disease only talks about muscular problems, arthritis, joint pain. These things are very common, but no one knows that bone loss occurs,” says Farooq, who is a trained dentist originally from Pakistan.
He completed a research-focused master’s in the U.K. and served as an assistant professor in Saudi Arabia before coming to Canada and joining the Faculty to study under associate professor Tara Moriarty. She’s an expert on infectious diseases who is cross-appointed to the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine.
As Farooq conducted animal studies to assess bone loss in different parts of the body, he thought it ironic that, as a dentist, he discovered the alveolar bone experienced long-term damage after a Lyme disease infection. “We saw that long bone loss repairs after a certain period of time. But jawbone loss, it is continuous, it is progressive and it is not repairable.
In his thesis, he explained that jaw-bone loss isn’t directly caused by the presence of spiral-shaped bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi in the bone, but by infection-induced inflammation driven by the cytokine IL-6, which suppresses bone-forming osteoblasts.
He says further studies need to confirm if this same phenomenon happens in humans. If so, dentists and physicians may begin asking about a history of Lyme disease — plus this finding adds to the urgency around developing a vaccine.
Farooq hopes to remain in Toronto, where his family is now happily settled, as he seeks his next role focused, ideally, on research in dentistry or beyond. “This PhD has opened up avenues for me on the medical side as well, as I’ve done research on microbiology, immunology and bone health.”
Also looking at bone — but the flipside, how to regenerate it — is PhD grad Nadeen Mahmoud Meshry. She helped create a DNA-based hydrogel to help developmental and acquired bone defects heal, especially after the likes of cancer surgery. Most bone grafts are made from human or animal materials, which can be rejected by the body, so having a synthetic alternative is better for patients.
“At first, there were a lot of new techniques for me to learn,” says Meshry of her PhD. She worked under associate professor Karina Carneiro, with assistance from professor Christopher McCulloch. “Karina was more on the biomaterials side and Chris was on the biology side, so I felt like both aspects of the project were very well covered by both sides of expertise.”
An in-lab challenge was developing a hydrogel that could help bones heal in the face and jaws without degrading too quickly after surgery. That took some tries, but she eventually landed on a biomaterial that, when injected into rat cranial bones, led to successful bone formation 60 days after surgery — the animal testing and other parts of the work were conducted elsewhere, as this was part of a multi-centre project.
Meshry continues in Carneiro’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow. In future, she thinks DNA hydrogels could lead to even more research projects, such as an investigation into their underlying mechanisms.
"The Faculty of Dentistry is probably one of the most translational faculties that exist"
After her postdoc, Meshry is not sure what’s next. A trained dentist from Egypt, she began teaching after graduation and then, via the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, did a master’s at the University of Pittsburgh. She came to Canada, following family and drawn by Carneiro’s research. She’s keen to pursue research along with teaching. “It’s something I still really enjoy,” she says of the latter.
As the eight new PhD grads from the Faculty celebrate the end of this phase of their scholarly endeavours, Bozec says he hopes they’ll spread the word that dentistry research has big impact.
“There’s a lot of research and work that goes into dentistry. The patient does not see it, but it’s all-encompassing,” he says. “We don’t always do a good job of explaining this or showing off how translational dentistry research really is. But the Faculty of Dentistry is probably one of the most translational faculties that exist.”
Congratulations to the class of 2025 PhD graduates
Meet the other six graduates and their thesis topics
Omnia Elebyary: Immune and Oral Predictors of Bloodstream Infections in allo-HSCT
Georgia Hadjis: A value-based framework for pain-cognition interactions
Mina Vaez: Engineering Durable and Functional Collagen Scaffolds: Glycation and Enzymatic Crosslinking Strategies for Tissue Repair
Fereshteh Younesi: Epigenetically Controlled Transcriptional Circuits Sustain the Myofibroblast Memory of Mesenchymal Stromal Cells
Maryam Zanjir: Developing a Core Outcomes Set in Endodontics
Haowei Zhao: Exploring DNA Adenine Methylation in Streptococcus mutans: Insights into Biofilm Formation and Self-DNA Defense
Top photo by David Lee