The February issue of Orthodontic Products will feature a profile of Hyun-Duck Nah, DMD, MSD, PhD, co-chair of the Doctors Scientific Program for the AAO’s 2010 Annual Session. Here is an excerpt:

The orthodontic profession has always represented a merger of science, dexterity, technology, and passion. For Hyun-Duck Nah, DMD, MSD, PhD, the combination nourishes a boundless curiosity that started at a young age, and continues today in the classroom and the clinic.

Take away the technological trappings, and Nah believes that the core of the profession is less about moving teeth, and more about changing lives. Faced early on with the case of a young boy with a serious overbite, she saw the power of orthodontics. “I did not just change his teeth—I changed him,” says Nah, who now serves as research director and associate professor in the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Years ago, as a newly minted dental school graduate out of Seoul National University in Korea, the 24-year-old Nah set out for America to continue her education. With an impressive resume, she had her pick of colleges, and eventually settled on Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland. The decision was anything but random, and instead represented a desire to study under Donald Enlow, PhD, the former acting dean and Thomas J. Hill Distinguished Professor Emeritus from CWRU’s School of Dental Medicine, and author of the Handbook of Facial Growth, a tome still used in orthodontics education.

While Enlow was not an orthodontist, he was a world-renowned biologist and expert in craniofacial development, and just the type of mind from which Nah could quench her thirst for knowledge. “I was always fascinated by how the face grows and develops,” says Nah, also an adjunct clinical associate professor in the Department of Orthodontics at Philadelphia-based Temple University. “I had braces when I was young, and it had an impact on me. I went to dental school to be an orthodontist from the get go, and. I wanted to study craniofacial growth, and that was where my heart was.”

—Greg Thompson

The complete article will appear in the February issue of Orthodontic Products. To read profiles of other prominent orthodontists, click here.