Melanie Morris

Melanie Morris, PhD, LICSW, is a social worker, researcher, and advocate for oral health equity. Her scholarship and teaching approach are grounded in her experience as a social work practitioner and researcher working in interdisciplinary settings with populations at the intersection of multiple oppressions. Using mixed methods, her research focuses on health equity and justice by examining how structural and social drivers of oral health intersect to shape service utilization and clinical outcomes for the Latino/a/e community. Her research also focuses on integrating social work practice into oral healthcare settings to improve delivery, policy, and patient outcomes. Her work has been supported by the CareQuest Institute for Oral Health.

Her social work practice has focused on the ground-up design and the hands-on delivery of social work services in dental education. She has developed and implemented social work services, curriculum, and practicum sites in didactic and clinical dental education. She has also played a key role in establishing a national network of social workers in dental education known as Social Work in Dentistry (SWID), which provides support and resources to foster the development or continuation of social work programs and practicum sites in dental care settings.