She is a highly respected expert in conservative dentistry and endodontics, and she always supports her students with dedication and enthusiasm. She and her students are looking for answers to important questions in their ongoing meta-analysis. In November, Enikő Vasziné Szabó was named Supervisor of the Month (Year 1) at the Centre for Translational Medicine.
Enikő Vasziné Szabó joined the CTM program last year as a supervisor. “This was suggested by a colleague, Zsolt Lohinai, who is also my mentor. Currently, I have one first-year Ph.D. student, Mojtaba Dahmardeh. My other student is Caroline Kelly, who is a second-year Ph.D. student. I really like the program; I can learn a lot from it. Translational medicine requires delicate and intensive work, it needs a completely different way of thinking than clinical research, which I have been doing for a long time.”
Mojtaba Dahmardeh is a DMD-PhD student interested in endodontics. He is investigating the efficacy and safety of lasers in endodontic treatment. “We are interested in how to make disinfection even more effective in root canal treatment. This is an important question because root canal treatment often has an unsuccessful outcome. It may not even be noticed immediately, only in the longer term when the inflammation flares up again. Therefore, it would be a great improvement if additional laser treatment could make disinfection more effective in root canal treatment. In such applications, lasers have both direct and indirect effects, depending on the type of the laser. There are many ways of testing its effectiveness. The literature on this subject is fascinating, with a lot of useful information.” In his other research, Mojtaba Dahmardeh investigates the prevalence rate of different oral bacteria in Alzheimer's disease. This is an interesting topic because there are some evidence that chronic inflammation of the oral cavity might be a risk factor for dementia.
Dr. Szabó has group meetings once a week with her student and the Dentistry Group, and also has project meetings with co-supervisor Dr. Lohinai and Dr. Alexander Schulze Wenning, who is their SMS. “I even meet with Mojtaba beyond these to practice for the group meetings and to check his results. If he has questions, he can ask me at these meetings. This is important because, as a dental student, he has a different perspective on research, he doesn't have all the knowledge yet. Therefore, it is important to enrich his knowledge to ensure that his literature research is well done. Our results might lead to new guidelines for root canal treatment. I have been involved in such work before, when we developed the guidelines for the use of direct restorative materials. Even then, we processed data from the literature, weighing the results of individual the studies.”
(Szabó Emese)