Mission and Vision
"The University of Michigan School of Dentistry is one of the nation's leading dental schools engaged in oral health care education, research, patient care, and community service. General dental care clinics and specialty clinics providing advanced treatment enable the School to offer dental services and programs to patients throughout Michigan. Classroom and clinic instruction train future dentists, dental specialists, and dental hygienists for practice in private offices, hospitals, academia, and public agencies. Research seeks to discover and apply new knowledge that can help patients worldwide."
To fulfill each of these missions requires vision and leadership. The mission of the Scholars Program in Dental Leadership (SPDL) is to facilitate these goals by providing dental students/dental hygiene students with skill sets that empower these visions through leadership training and provision of the opportunity to exercise these skills.
The SPDL Program Aims To:
- To encourage critical thinking in Leadership for Dentistry and to encourage new experiences in the education requirements.
- To serve the dental community by functioning as a laboratory for educational innovation.
- To cultivate in the dental undergraduate/dental hygiene students the capacity to undertake independent study and supervised research.
- To maximize the Dental School's position of leadership in dental education by offering the program as a model/subject/resources for scholarly and intellectual enrichment.
- To advance the Dental School's mission through offering a high quality education to a diverse student population and to assist the University's efforts to recruit highly qualified students for all its divisions.