I had an interest in sciences and I liked helping people. And I had a roommate whose dad was a dentist, and I spent a day shadowing him and from that point on it was an easy choice for me. I also had my mentor, my first mentor was my dentist and when I was growing up and she was a YMCA, she’s the person that taught me how to swim and dive into the deep end of the pool. I had a mentor from life that turned into a dentist, and so she’s the one that guided me into how it’s great to be involved, and know the community and you can really be an integral part of people’s lives. So she was very special in my decision to do that.

I grew up in New Mexico and we don’t have a dental school so that was a challenge for me. In fact I was at a large state school and there were only three pre-dental students, but fortunately I won a grant and I went to Boston to Tufts University and I was very honored to get to go there and start my career there. At Tufts one of the things that they said was, “We’re going to teach you to be great clinicians but you have to go learn how to practice.” And so I did a residency in advanced general dentistry because I wanted to learn great comprehensive care to take back to the small town that I lived in. I wanted to go back and give to the rural area where I grew up, and came to Oklahoma and I actually planted roots here and raised my family and now I consider Oklahoma home.

So they don’t call it practice for a reason, well, without a reason, they call it practice because you can’t stop. The minute you stop learning then you stop growing. I feel very passionately about staying on the top of the procedures out there, the materials, the science is always growing and so I work hard and I know that Dr. Lopez, both Dr. Lopezes work hard on staying on top of technology and what we can provide to our patients. We don’t want to be doing what’s been done because it’s been done before and it’s worked okay. We want to be doing what’s the best for our patient that’s in the chair in front of us at the time.