Heiko Spallek
Biography
Dr. Heiko Spallek serves as Pro-Dean at The University of Sydney, Faculty of Dentistry where his key responsibilities include the consolidation of the dental school’s operations and developing the strategic plan for the school in alignment with the direction of the University. He works closely with the Dean and faculty leadership to promote cross-faculty and external shared understanding, including negotiations with New South Wales Health and Local Health Districts, to establish joint appointments to share teaching, research and clinical service. Prior to joining The University of Sydney, Dr. Spallek served as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Dental Medicine where he co-founded, and lead as Executive Director, the Center for Informatics in Oral Health Translational Research. At the University of Pittsburgh, he still holds adjunct appointments in the Dental Public Health Department (School of Dental Medicine), in the Department for Biomedical Informatics (School of Medicine) and in the School of Information Sciences. In 1993, Dr. Spallek graduated from the School of Dentistry, Humboldt University Berlin where he continued his career and was appointed as a faculty in the Department of Periodontology and also received his PhD in the field of dental material sciences. While being faculty at Temple University School of Dentistry, Philadelphia, he earned an MSBA with a concentration in Computer and Information Science from the Fox School of Business and Management at Temple in 2000. Dr. Spallek is a graduate of the American Dental Education Association’s Leadership Institute. His research has as its focus the development of educational resources for dental professionals and the creation of online communities—he published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and a textbook for Dental Informatics that has been published in Germany and in the US. His projects have a foundation in the fields of education, usability engineering, medical and dental informatics and computer science. He served as PI of several NIH-supported research projects aiming to improve the adoption of Evidence-Based Dentistry. In September 2015, Dr. Spallek received as principal investigator a US$900,000 federal contract from the National Institutes on Drug Abuse to develop a “Center of Excellence in Pain Education: Pain Challenges in Primary Care.†The project brings together twenty-two faculty from five health science schools who collaborate to develop interactive virtual cases ranging from opioid misuse following wisdom teeth extraction to widespread pain & fibromyalgia. Dr. Spallek was elected as board member of the Consortium for Oral Health Research and Informatics (COHRI). He serves as the representative of the American Association for Dental Research on the American Dental Association’s Standards Committee on Dental Informatics (SCDI) and has recently been elected as Vice Chairman of the Subcommittee on Knowledge Management. Dr. Spallek is chair of the Dental Informatics Section of the American Dental Education Association.EDUCAUSE Presentations
Memberships
| EDUCAUSE | Member |