Kinney’s path to this leadership position in academia seemed unlikely in the early years of her career. After receiving her BSDH from the U-M dental school in 1983, she started a 20-year trek through clinical practice in the United States and Europe, moving every three years on average as her husband, Steve, was promoted and transferred for his engineering and finance positions in the automotive industry. Kinney practiced briefly in Lansing after earning her degree, then they moved to the Detroit, Minneapolis and Toledo areas, followed by time in Zurich, Switzerland, then to London, England, and back to Zurich.
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Profile: Janet Kinney Patience and persistence led a DH alumna back to the dental school and a leadership position As the Dental Hygiene program at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry prepares to celebrate its centennial in 2021, its director, Janet Kinney, is leading it through changes that will be major milestones in its history. The COVID-19 pandemic brought a set of challenges that required the program to implement creative and groundbreaking solutions when a portion of the traditional in-person classes and hygiene training were forced to move online. That layer of complexity hit just as the program was already in the midst of a significant changeover for its undergraduate BSDH degree, moving it from the longstanding three-year
course of study with summer breaks to a year-round schedule that requires only two years to complete. With the upcoming centennial bringing a focus on history, Kinney said she is at once grateful and inspired to be part of both a program and dental school with such longstanding records of excellence and leadership in dentistry. “Being here at Michigan, being in this environment, with excellence in multiple areas – education, research and service – it’s very rewarding,” she said. “In this job, there is never a dull moment and always something happening. But we have such great collaboration and great resources so that we can excel in all those areas."
“I’m proof that this profession has flexibility,” Kinney says. “I was very fortunate because my career could pick up and move. It was good exposure for me.” She learned that dental problems and treatment are pretty much universal – even when the patient in the dental chair is speaking German. In London, she couldn’t practice as a hygienist because the United Kingdom didn’t recognize U.S. licenses at the time. Even that had a benefit, Kinney said, because she worked instead as a dental assistant and learned firsthand the demands and challenges of another position in the dental office. “When I graduated in 1983, I had it in my mind to come back to school for my master’s after probably about five or six years of practicing,” she said. It ended up being 21, but her patience and persistence paid off in 2004 when she applied for graduate school and was offered a graduate fellowship. As Kinney worked on her master’s degree, she was returning to interests she had developed many years before. She originally started college with the intent of majoring in education and becoming a teacher, but that changed when she took a job as a receptionist in the East Lansing dental office of the late Dr. George Bettman (U-M DDS 1952). She spent a lot of time watching how patients received treatment from the dentist and his hygienists. “I saw how dental hygiene can impact someone’s life in such a positive way,” she said. “Lots of Michigan State students were patients there, including some with serious dental issues. I saw first-hand how the hygienists could transform someone who came in with severe periodontal disease and bring them back to good oral health. I decided I wanted to do that.” Continued
FACULTY 11 Fall 2020 | M Dentistry
