Svoboda, Nair assume new roles

With the new Clinic & Education Building comes a new way of life, including job titles, at Texas A&M College of Dentistry. Dr. Kathy Svoboda and Dr. M.K. Nair were recently named assistant dean for the oral biology graduate program and assistant dean for advanced clinical education, respectively.

In their new roles as of Nov. 1, Svoboda and Nair began working closely with Dr. Larry Bellinger, associate dean for research & graduate studies. Some of his duties and responsibilities have been realigned to accommodate changes related to the new clinical setting.

“As our college successfully continues to grow and progress into the future, it becomes part of the natural process to restructure some administrative duties in order to achieve new goals,” says Dr. Lawrence Wolinsky, dean.

Svoboda became director of the oral biology graduate program in 2009 and was named a Texas A&M University System Regents Professor the same year. Her research focuses on signal transduction pathways controlling developmental processes and cell biology of adult tissues. She was awarded the Institutional Service Award by the school in 2017. She joined the College of Dentistry faculty in 1998 after a research and teaching stint as part of a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School and Boston University School of Medicine. Svoboda has a Ph.D. in anatomy and a master’s in human genetics from the University of Nebraska Medical Center and a bachelor’s from the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Nair has been director of the Imaging Center since joining the school in August 2017. He also is graduate program director of the oral and maxillofacial radiology residency program and a tenured professor in diagnostic sciences. He received his dental degree from the University of Kerala, India, and from the University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine. He earned a master’s in oral and maxillofacial radiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Dentistry and a master’s and Ph.D. in radiology from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Nair implemented enterprise-wide digital radiology and established the largest radiology residency program in North America, among other achievements, at the University of Florida College of Dentistry.