AIDPH Leadership

CREEDD was established at Boston University in 2001 and is supported by the National Institutes of Health. The Center’s aims are to identify the determinants of oral health disparities and to design and implement community-based interventions to eliminate oral health disparities, with a current focus on children and their caregivers. In addition, he is the Director of the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA) Dental Longitudinal Study (DLS), a decades-long investigation on aging and oral health. The VA-DLS has also examined the role that oral conditions may play as risk factors for cardiovascular disease and other systemic health outcomes, and how oral conditions may affect health-related quality of life.

At the national level, Dr. Garcia has served as President (1998-1999) of the Hispanic Dental Association, the national organization whose primary mission is to improve the oral health of Latinos in the U.S. He is also a Past-President (2017-2018) of the American Association for Dental Research. In 2019, he became the first dentist appointed to the Advisory Committee on Minority Health of the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services (DHHS). The Committee advises DHHS on policies and programs for improving the health of racial and ethnic minority populations in the U.S. At the local level, he has served as Chair, and current member, of the Massachusetts Oral Health Advocacy Task Force, and as President (2010-2011) of Health Care for All, Inc., the major consumer-based health advocacy organization in Massachusetts.

Dr. Garcia is a 1981 graduate of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, where he received the D.M.D. degree summa cum laude.  He completed his specialty training in Periodontology in 1984, and went on to receive a Master of Medical Sciences degree from Harvard in 1985.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Dentists.