Dr. Robert S. Roda Leads Arizona Dental Association
AAE Past President Dr. Robert S. Roda Becomes 110th President of Arizona Dental Association
Earlier this year, AAE Past President Dr. Robert S. Roda took the reins as the 110th president of the Arizona Dental Association. Dr. Roda’s basic goals for his AzDA presidency include leaving the organization in better shape than he found it, and getting AzDA into a position where it is better able to see and manage the future.
“I am especially proud of our volunteer leaders and staff (especially our executive director, Kevin Earle), who have been working hard for the last 10 years to analyze and help solve the access to care problems that exist in Arizona,” he wrote in a profile article published in the January issue of AzDA’s Inscriptions magazine.
Challenges he plans to tackle in his presidency include “out-of-state special interest groups with uncertain financing and purpose that have been spending massive amounts of money here to push an ineffective concept, the dental therapist, to presumably help enhance access to care,” he wrote.
“The real problem is that our public systems of treatment delivery, treatment financing and especially oral health literacy, need an overhaul. It’s like trying to correct the smoking epidemic of past decades by creating more lung surgeons.”
Other priorities include updating AzDA’s strategic plan: “This process is important to help focus our efforts on what we can do to help our profession and our patients in the future.”
Dr. Roda is an endodontic consultant to the Arizona State Board of Dental Examiners, visiting lecturer in the Endodontic Department at the Arizona School of Dentistry and Oral Health, and associate editor of the Journal of Endodontics. He received his B.S. in Biology (1977) and D.D.S. degrees (1981) at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and practiced as a general dentist in Nova Scotia for 10 years. He earned his M.S. in Oral Biology and Certificate of Endodontics at Baylor College of Dentistry in Dallas in 1993 and became a Diplomate of the American Board of Endodontics in 1998.