USING HER VOICE

Dr. Jessica C. Williams DPH 23 fell in love with dentistry when she volunteered at a community dental clinic during college – indeed, she fell in love with the idea of using dentistry to improve people’s lives.

So when she recently received the Dr. Bessie E. Delaney Scholarship from the National Dental Association Foundation, it was especially meaningful, she said, as Dr. Annie Elizabeth “Bessie” Delaney, the only black woman to graduate in her dental school class at Columbia University in 1923 and the second Black woman licensed to practice dentistry in New York, was a huge force in her community.

“She was never afraid to use her voice to talk about injustice,” Williams said. “She spoke up for herself and she spoke up for the underserved, and that’s somebody who I want to be honored alongside with.”

As Williams learned more about health disparities, she realized that she wanted to pair dentistry with public health.

While in dental school at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Williams was selected for the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, for which she created an oral health literacy program for a food bank. She imagined that her work through the fellowship would be focused on teaching people how to brush and floss effectively, but instead, most of her conversations focused on access to care.

After dental school, Williams participated in the National Health Service Corps, picking a clinic in rural, southeastern Iowa to complete her service. Up until that point, her experiences with underserved populations had always been in urban settings; now, she