Mary Tavares, DMD, MPH

Mary Tavares, DMD, MPH

Program Director for the Advanced Graduate Program in Dental Public Health, Harvard School of Dental Medicine
Senior Clinical Investigator, The Forsyth Institute
Large

Dr. Mary Tavares serves as an Investigator. She is currently the Program Director for the Advanced Graduate Program in Dental Public Health at Harvard School of Dental Medicine, as well as a Senior Clinical Investigator at The Forsyth Institute Cambridge, MA). She is a graduate of Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston University School of Graduate Dentistry (Dental Public Health Certificate), and a former Robert Wood Johnson Fellow in Health Services Research. Dr. Tavares has focused her research in both the clinical and policy arena, funded by NIH and private foundation grants. As a board-certified Public Health Dentist, her efforts have focused on impacting the oral health of the public, particularly in the area of clinical outcomes research and expansion of the traditional roles of the dental professionals to include systemic health assessments and interventions. Currently, her work is focused on the development and implementation of an intervention to prevent childhood obesity in the context of routine dental visits. She has also been examining the effects of sleep and diet on obesity, metabolic syndrome and oral health in a longitudinal study of over 6,000 Kuwaiti adolescents. Additionally, she is working on developing an effective and feasible program for chronic disease screening in the dental setting, with a particular focus on obesity related diseases.