2025 Lifetime Achievement Award Lecture; The Future is Digital

Opportunity knocks many times in life and doors open. What rests behind the research door was the most interesting to me because I always was drawn to the unknown. Some of my research efforts have been successful and are the subject of this talk. The general theme of past work was orthodontics and included teratogens, growth and development, orthodontic materials, and treatment results. However, for the past several years I focused more broadly on optimizing clinical progress by promoting standardization of data in digital formats. Standardization, particularly of computerized clinical data, will boost our effectiveness through artificial intelligence, materials science, advanced manufacturing and clinical treatment choices. The future is digital.