School of Dentistry welcomes new dean to UMMC faculty

Medical Center leadership is proud to announce the following addition to its faculty and leadership staff.

Sreenivas “Sree” Koka, DDS, PhD

Dr. Sreenivas “Sree” Koka, has joined the Medical Center faculty as dean of the School of Dentistry.

A native of Romford, Essex, United Kingdom, Koka received his DDS and his MS in prosthodontics from the University of Michigan, his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and his PhD from the University of Nebraska. He had his postdoctoral research fellowship in signal transduction at the Eppley Institute for Research in Cancer and Allied Diseases at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

A lecturer in the Department of Prosthodontics at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, he joined the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Dentistry faculty in 1992 as an assistant professor of adult restorative dentistry and became the Merritt C. Pederson Professor of Dentistry there in 1998. In 2004, he joined the Mayo Clinic as an associate professor of dentistry in the School of Graduate Medicine and, three years later, became a professor of dentistry and chairman of the Department of Dental Specialties.

In the ensuing years, he has served as founder and owner of Premium Dental Editing, LLC; Koka Dental Corporation of San Diego, California; and the nonprofit Career Design in Dentistry of San Diego. He has been a lecturer in the Division of Advanced Prosthodontics and Hospital Dentistry at the University of California Los Angeles School of Dentistry, where he served as interim chairman of the Section of Restorative Dentistry from 2017-18, and a clinical professor in the Department of Restorative Dentistry at the Loma Linda University School of Dentistry.

His extensive clinical practice in prosthodontics covers almost 30 years, from the UNMC College of Dentistry, Lincoln, Nebraska, to the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, to the UCLA Faculty Group Dental Practice, Los Angeles, to the Koka Dental Clinic, San Diego.

A diplomate of the American Board of Prosthodontics and a fellow of the American College of Dentists and the Academy of Prosthodontics, Koka has received numerous Outstanding Teacher of the Year awards and the Margaret L. A. MacVicar Award from the MIT Alumni Association. He has given more than 180 invited presentations at dentistry meetings nationally and internationally and is the author or coauthor of 105 articles in peer-reviewed professional publications, nine book chapters and 31 abstracts.

An active member of the American Association of Dental Research, the American Dental Educators Association, the International Association of Dental Research and the International College of Prosthodontists, Koka’s completed grant and contract support has exceeded $10 million.