2022 FDS research awards recipients

The Faculty of Dental Surgery at The Royal College of Surgeons of England is delighted to announce the recipients of the 2022 research grants and fellowship awards. More information on our research programme can be found in the oral and dental research section. 

The quality of the applicants in terms of their achievements, supervisory team and proposed research was nothing less than outstanding in this year’s pump-priming grants and fellowship awards. Many congratulations to the 11 recipients of a pump-priming grant and the two recipients of a fellowship. We wish the awardees every success with their research projects and future academic careers.  

2022 FDS research award recipients

FDS Dental Research Fellowship

• David Edwards, Newcastle University: exploring pulpitis and its treatment’s effects on peripheral and central mechanisms (ExtirPate study).

FDS-BOS Research Fellowship

• Daniel Stonehouse-Smith, King's College London: analysing the cellular mechanisms of cleft palates.

FDS Pump-Priming Grant

• Sonam Haria, Guy's Dental Hospital: effect of head and neck radiotherapy on the vitality of dental pulp.
• Sadia Niazi, King's College London: inflammatory biomarkers linking apical periodontitis with cardiovascular diseases risk.

FDS-BAOS Pump-Priming Grant

• Farah Ghulam Hussain, Eastman Dental Institute: does unilateral local anaesthetic blockade of the chorda tympani nerve prevent fMRI taste nucleus activity in response to gustatory stimulation?

FDS-BSG Pump-Priming Grant

• Rakhee Patel, King's College London: teledentistry in care homes: an acceptable reality?

FDS-BSPD Pump-Priming Grant

• Nabih Alkhouri, UCL Eastman Dental Institute: renewal MI sealing ability and characterisation of the adhesion interface.
• Claudia Heggie, University of Leeds: an investigation of the acceptability of photobiomodulation for prevention of oral mucositis in children and young people undergoing inpatient chemotherapy.

FDS-BSP Pump-Priming Grant

• Annika Therese Kroeger, Birmingham Dental Hospital: molecular cartography of ‘health’ and ‘diseased’ gingival tissues.

FDS-BISOM Pump-Priming Grant

• Kim Hamilton, Queen's University Belfast: global transcriptomic profiling of patients with temporomandibular disorders: a pilot investigation on the molecular mechanisms of pain.
• Caroline McCarthy, University of Liverpool: an oral cancer toolkit for community pharmacists.
• Sangeetha Yogarajah, Guy's Hospital: highly multiplexed gene expression analysis in patients with proliferative verrucous leukoplakia.

FDS-SAAD Pump-Priming Grant

• Sami Stagnell, SmileKind, specialist oral surgery practice: exploring ease of implementation and barriers to implementing capnography in IV sedation.

Professor Helen Rodd MBE, Chair of the FDS Research Committee, noted it was encouraging to see good equality and diversity within the successful cohort. ‘I would like to say a big "thank you" to Judy Dodds for the fabulous administration of the whole process and the many colleagues who gave up their time to review these research applications, both internal and external to the FDS.’

Thanks are also given to the following specialist societies who generously co-funded some of the pump-priming grants: The British Association of Oral Surgeons; British Society of Gerodontology; British and Irish Society of Oral Medicine; British Society of Paediatric Dentistry; British Society of Periodontology and Implant Dentistry and The Society for the Advancement of Anaesthesia in Dentistry.

Professor Rodd added, ‘I should mention that representatives from the British and Irish Society of Oral Medicine were so impressed with their applications that they actually awarded three grants! My hope for the coming year is to further build our research budget to help even more early career researchers progress to future research leads.’