Ecco la lettera del Dr. Emanuele Cicero alla Tufts University.
Since my childhood, I have spent much of my free time at my father’s dental office in Italy. I loved watching him treat his patients and years of my favorite memories are filled with the smells of eugenol and sounds of dental drills. Although my father’s work has always inspired me, I became specifically fascinated with prosthethic rehabilitation following the events of one morning in February 2002. After my best friend had been in a terrible car accident in Rome, Italy and consequently lost both of his central incisors, I witnessed firsthand how the prosthetist, the lab technician and the endodontist were able to return his smile in just one day! At this young age, I recognized the tremendous impact the dentist had in my friend’s life and decided that I too wished to use prosthetic dentistry to reconstruct a sea of happy smiles. Since then, I have pursued my dental studies with a focus on prosthetics in order to someday achieve this dream. As soon as I finished my high school specialized in classical studies I decided to obtain a dental lab technician diploma which has proven very useful for my continuing dental studies.
After high school, I left Italy to study in Madrid at Universidad Europea de Madrid, where I spent time interning with Dr.Julio Acero Sanz, president of IAOM (world society of Oral and maxillofacial surgery) and director of the maxillo-facial surgery department of both the Quiròn and Ramon y Cajal hospitals in Madrid. This has been a great honor for me as I was introduced to his team of Prosthodontists and learned a lot both from their hospital and private practice oral rehabilitation cases.
Following my studies in Madrid, in an attempt to advance my knowledge beyond my academic and part time practice in Madrid, I recently completed a 6 month long internship in Brazil with Dr. Dickson Martins Fonseca President of the Brazilian Society of Aesthetic Dentistry (SBOE), focusing on oral rehabilitation and advanced prosthodontics. Dr. Fonseca pressed upon me the importance of synergy and team work in order for success in dentistry; working with his multispecialty and interdisciplinary team of Prosthodontics, Periodontists and Orthodontists I learned to manage a variety of cases requiring a diverse set of skills in order to achieve ideal patient results. During the course of my internship, I worked in the Potiguar University Clinic and in the Police public hospital. While there, I completed a practical course on strategies for ceramic aesthetic restorations with Prof. Sidney Kina as well as a course in Curritiba, Brazil, with NYU professor Ronaldo Hirata on stratification techniques with composite resins.
I therefore became excited not only about functional reconstruction, but also about the concept of aesthetic rehabilitation, an exciting field further expanded everyday through developments in materials and technological advances in planning and construction.
I am now applying to the Post Graduate Prosthodontics Specialty at Tufts University of Dental Medicine in hopes of conducting further research and advancing my understanding of data collection, statistical analysis, and presentation in a scientific forum. I am thrilled to improve my diagnosis, treatment and maintenance skills as they apply to a variety of prosthodontic clinical cases and to take part in the scientific and Prosthodontics meetings held by Tufts. In addition, I am excited to share my experiences and knowledge while instructing predoctororal dental students as I become deeply emerged in the Tufts dentistry community.
While working with doctors and lab technicians in Spain, Italy, Brazil and the U.S., I faced and overcame many challenges that have prepared me to tackle the demands of Tufts Post Graduate Prosthodontics Program. My international experiences helped me improve my knowledge of dentistry and to understand the evolution of dental practice in foreign countries, as well as to refine my English, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian language skills. My recent graduation research focuses on prosthetic rehabilitation with immediate implant loading, and I intend use this Prosthodontics PG Program to further advance my studies and to apply the results that I have learned to patients. It is my strong passion for dental prosthetics that best defines and drives me as a person each and every day, which is natural given the family of dentists that I have grown up in; I truly seem to have dentistry in my blood. In our family’s clinics my father is an orthodontist and my brother is currently completing his Master’s Degree at NYU in Perio. Someday, I wish to become the prosthodontist in this tripartite family business.
I hope to achieve this dream as an alumni of the Post Graduate Prosthodontics Program at Tufts.
