Dr. Eric Kang Ting DMD, DMEDSC

Dr. Eric Kang Ting is an adjunct professor at the American Dental Association-Forsyth Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a visiting professor at the Taiwan National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University. He graduated from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine with Magna Cum Laude and the Gold Award with DMD in 1991, becoming the first Asian ever to obtain those awards. He then earned a Doctor of Medical Science and an orthodontic certificate from Harvard in 1994. For over 20 years at UCLA, Dr. Ting was an Academic Senate Tenured Professor and the founding chair of the Division of Growth and Development (Orthodontics and Pediatric Dentistry) and a joint professor at the School of Medicine and School of Engineering at UCLA. Clinically, he specializes in treating patients with craniofacial anomalies and has volunteered as an attending member of the UCLA craniofacial team for over 20 years. He also organized and sponsored dental services for the Wounded Warriors program and their families in collaboration with UCLA's "Operation Mend" program. He received the US Navy's Appreciation Coin. Dr. Ting has a Google Scholar H-Index of 63, making him one of the top academic orthodontists in the world. He served as a PARC AAOF committee member from 2015 until 2024. His research team was the first and only group to receive the AAOF Center grant "Standard Characterization of Clear Orthodontic Aligners" on this topic. The goal is to establish the first academic center to set the standard and share independently tested, reliable test data on commercial clear aligners for the information of AAO members. His original research has received more than 14,000 citations. As the principal author, it has been published in many leading journals, including Nature Communications, Nature Microgravity, Journal of Clinical Investigation, PLOS One, and Biomaterials. Dr. Ting has received over $30M in funding from NIH as a key investigator in his career. Based on his research, two novel biologic drugs are currently in FDA clinical trials for scar reduction and bone regeneration. He was the first dentist scientist as one of the principal investigators for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) International Space Station (ISS) RR 5 project. He and his team received the International Space Station (ISS) Innovation Award for Biology and Medicine from the American Astronautical Society.