CATEGORY AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST 37 AUSTRALIAN DENTISTRY AWARDS After more than five decades in dentistry, Marget works with clinicians at every career stage – from early-career dentists navigating their first difficult patient conversations, to mid-career professionals working through stagnation, to senior practitioners thinking about legacy. His philosophy remains grounded in that same insight. “Technical competence is essential, but long-term professional success comes from combining technical skills with communication, confidence, ethics, and sound judgement.” He is emphatic that effective mentorship means understanding the individual behind the professional. “Mentorship is about helping dental professionals become the best version of themselves rather than trying to make them practise exactly as I did.” The tool he returns to, across all career stages, is role-play. “There’s nothing quite like rehearsal.” The most common challenge he sees in young dentists is not clinical. “They do not feel empowered. They don’t feel as though they have the capacity to talk and convince people about complex restorations and treatment programmes. This is why, during all of the training that we do, role playing is so important. (It is) critical to success.” The 2025 award confirms something he has long felt about work done outside the chair. “This recognition has meant a great deal to me. It now quantifies the work that I have done outside my actual working chairside as meaningful and important.” On where dental education is heading: “The human touch is still the most important touch ever, and if we lose that, we lose everything.” Orthodontic Educator of the Year – Dr Geoff Hall Dr Geoff Hall built OrthoED on a single conviction: that teaching clinicians a system is not the same as teaching them to think. “Orthodontics is not a collection of recipes. It is a discipline built on sound biomechanical principles, and once a clinician understands those principles, they can treat a case they have never seen before rather than reaching for a systemspecific formula. That single idea shapes everything we design at OrthoED.” Having treated more than 15,000 cases personally and guided general dentists through more than 10,000 others, he is precise about where practitioners genuinely struggle. “It is rarely the textbook case. It is the moment something does not go to plan and they have no framework to fall back on. So I teach the why before the how, and I teach it in several different ways until every person in the room understands it. I do not move on simply because most have grasped it.” The gap he set out to close was one he had lived. Beginning as the first practitioner outside the United States to place aligners in 1999, he found that general dentists wanting to learn orthodontics properly had nowhere to go. “That left a large and capable group of dentists stranded – either avoiding orthodontics altogether or, worse, attempting cases beyond their training with no guidance.” carried her through was not strategy but stubbornness. “The first stretch was mostly survival.” The win, she is clear, belongs to the team. “External recognition does something useful inside a practice: it gives the team a standard to hold to and a reason to keep raising it.” For the patients who trusted the practice before it had much of a track record, the award has been “a quiet reassurance that the change was worth it.” Her advice to any dentist considering practice ownership is unambiguous: “Make sure you have a strong network and good support around you, and if you don’t have it yet, invest in building it before you need it.” And then, the line she reduces everything to: “It was never really about the business. The business is people. Get that part right and most of the rest follows.” Education and Mentorship – Dr Harry Marget Dr Harry Marget’s path into dental mentorship ran, in his early years, through live theatre – monologues, Shakespeare, debating teams. The discipline shaped everything he would later bring to clinical education. “The ability to speak is one thing. The ability to take someone on a journey is another thing. And finally, to arrive at a destination confident and well rounded is the most critical thing.” OrthoED was built to close that gap: today it spans a two-year Mini Masters, Eduqual-accredited diplomas, and programs in Vietnam, Malaysia, and India. “We began with foundational courses and have grown into a full pathway,” he says. “Throughout all of it, the founding philosophy has not changed. We teach principles, not products, and we never leave a clinician without support.” On the award: “Awards in clinical education are not won on marketing; they are won on whether clinicians come away able to do better work for their patients.” He is equally clear the recognition is shared. “An educator is only as good as the people around them.” And most of all, it reflects on the students. “The dentists who back themselves to learn orthodontics properly, who do the work and grow into confident clinicians, are the entire point of what we built. This award belongs to all of them as much as it belongs to me.” u
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