On the Friday morning of ADX Sydney 2026 I facilitated the Australian Dental Research Foundation breakfast panel, in front of a room that had turned up at nine in the morning to talk about research funding. That says something on its own.
It was a privilege to sit alongside four people who have spent their careers on this, and the most useful hour of my three days at the show.
The panel
- Conjoint Associate Professor Deb Cockrell AM
- Associate Professor Munira Xaymardan
- Dr Matt Hopcraft
- Professor Ajesh George
The brief for the session was to hear from people who have benefited from ADRF grants, and what those grants made possible. What we got was broader and more pointed than that.
Oral health is not a separate conversation
Much of the discussion sat on the connections between oral health and systemic disease, diabetes and heart disease among them.
This is the part that never quite reaches the public conversation. Dentistry is still discussed as though it stops at the mouth, and funded as though it stops at the mouth. The research says otherwise, and has for a long time. The panel made the case plainly: oral health is general health, and treating it as a separate category has consequences that show up in hospitals rather than in dental chairs.
Who is missing out
The second theme was access. The panel talked about the communities across Australia carrying the worst oral health outcomes and the least access to care, and about how much of that disadvantage is predictable, measurable and largely unaddressed.
It is uncomfortable listening for a profession, which is exactly why it belongs on a main stage at the biggest dental event in the country rather than in a journal nobody outside the field reads.
Research needs to be done together
The third theme was coordination. Dental research done in isolation from medical research, public health and the communities it is meant to serve produces work that is harder to translate into anything a patient experiences.
Interdisciplinary is an overused word. What the panel described was more practical than the word suggests: researchers who know each other, share data, and design studies that answer questions clinicians and patients actually have.
Why the ADRF matters
The point that landed hardest was about money.
Dental research receives very little funding compared with other areas of medical research. Both Dr Hopcraft and Professor George were direct about what that means in practice: without ADRF grants, a number of the advances the profession now takes for granted would not have happened at all.
Early grants do more than fund a single study. They let a researcher prove an area is worth pursuing, which is what unlocks the larger funding later. They build the expertise that turns into a career. And they keep researchers in universities, where they teach the next generation of clinicians. A small grant early is not a small thing. It is often the only thing.
Every ticket to the breakfast was donated to the ADRF, which is a neat model: a room of clinicians funding the research that will eventually change what they do.
What I took from it
I spend most of my working life on the operational side of practice, the marketing, the systems, the admin that keeps a practice running. It is easy to forget that everything a practice does clinically rests on work that somebody funded, often barely, twenty years earlier.
The panel agreed on where this goes next: the profession has to work as one on this, because the future of dental research is not only a dentistry question. It is an oral health and general health question for everyone in the country.
The Australian Dental Association wrote up the session as well, if you would like the fuller account: dental research firmly in the spotlight at recent industry event.
Watch it again
The full conversation is on YouTube: watch it here.
Thank you to the ADRF for having me facilitate, to the four panellists for their honesty, and to everyone who bought a ticket and turned up early. If you were at ADX for the rest of the week, I also ran three practical AI sessions across the three days.
Everything a practice does clinically rests on work that somebody funded, often barely, twenty years earlier.
Carolyn S Dean, Founder, Trilbii AI
From the Australian Dental Research Foundation breakfast panel at ADX Sydney, Friday 27 March 2026, facilitated by Carolyn S Dean.
