Alonso Carrasco-Labra: appointment to the faculty of Penn Dental Medicine
Building on the breadth and depth of the school’s academics and scholarships, Penn Dental Medicine welcomes Alonso Carrasco-Labra to its faculty. A leading authority in evidence-based healthcare, Dr Carrasco-Labra joined the school on October 25. He was appointed an associate professor on the tenure track in the Department of Preventive and Restorative Sciences pending approval by the school’s staff committees and the Provost’s Bureau.
“We are extremely happy to have Dr. Carrasco-Labra with us,” said Mark S. Wolff, Dean of Morton Amsterdam from Penn Dental Medicine. “He is one of the world’s leading experts in evidence-based dentistry and evidence-based health policy and will go a long way in expanding our leadership in these areas. “
Dr Carrasco-Labra comes to Penn Dental Medicine from the American Dental Association (ADA), where he served as Senior Director of the Department of Evidence Synthesis and Translational Research at the ADA Science and Research Institute. Prior to this role, he was Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Dentistry at the ADA.
He received his DDS from the University of Chile and completed his doctorate in health research methodology and a master’s degree in clinical epidemiology from McMaster University in Canada. Dr Carrasco-Labra has a broad portfolio as a widely published author, guest speaker, and national and international consultant. He has served as clinical practice director and policy methodologist for the Pan American Health Organization / World Health Organization (PAHO), World Bank, United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), as well as governments and health care agencies in Saudi Arabia, Spain, Dominican Republic, United Kingdom, Canada, Colombia, Chile and other ministries of health in the world. For many years, Dr Carrasco-Labra was also active with Cochrane, an independent global organization recognized internationally as the benchmark for high quality information on the effectiveness of healthcare. Currently he is part of Cochrane’s Oral Health Group, Wound Group, Patient Reported Outcome Methods Group, and GRADEing Group.
In the area of research, Dr. Carrasco-Labra is currently Principal Investigator of an FDA-funded grant titled “Evidence-Based Clinical Practice Guideline for the Management of Acute Dental Pain: Development, Implementation, and Evaluation Using Data Analytics to Target an Implementation Strategy. ”During his career he has held faculty positions and was a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Chile; Faculty of Dentistry, University of Toronto; School of Dentistry, University of Buffalo, and the University of North Carolina School of Dentistry at Chapel Hill.
At Penn Dental Medicine, Dr Carrasco-Labra will work as part of the school’s new Center for Integrative Global Oral Health (CIGOH), which was launched earlier this year (Almanac August 10, 2021).
