Bulletin

Issue: January/February 2008

News

Head of new Dental School

Professor Peter Wilson — a former specialist and educator in restorative dentistry at the University of Melbourne — has taken up his post as head of La Trobe University's new Dental School in Bendigo.

The La Trobe School is the first to be opened in Victoria since 1904, and only the second in Australia in more than 60 years. It enrols its first 50 students this year. When they graduate in 2012, Professor Wilson says they will begin to alleviate the national shortage of dentists, particularly in rural and regional areas.

A leading figure in the discipline of Prosthodontics, Professor Wilson has helped shape international standards for dentistry. He graduated from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1984, training in hospitals and working in general practice in the UK before gaining a Fellowship in Dental Surgery and Diploma in Restorative Dentistry from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1987.

He became a lecturer in restorative dentistry at the University of Melbourne in 1991, completed his PhD there, and went on to develop its graduate program in Prosthodontics, turning it into the leading program in Australasian. For the past 13 years he also played a key role in revising the University of Melbourne's undergraduate dental curriculum.