Valenzuela awarded two national scholarships

Kristen Valenzuela, Master of Science in Dental Hygiene candidate at UTHealth Houston School of Dentistry, has recently been named the 2024 recipient of two separate national scholarship awards. These awards add to her growing tally of scholarships that have been garnered during the year.

One of the awards is the 2024 Crest Oral-B BRIDGES Scholarship, sponsored by the Hispanic Dental Association Foundation and Hispanic Star. Valenzuela was one of 30 Hispanic/Latino students pursuing a career in dentistry and dental hygiene to win the national scholarship.

The Crest Oral-B BRIDGES Scholarship Program aims to support Hispanic and Latino students during their academic training, creating a bridge to drive equal representation among dental professionals for future generations currently enrolled in a CODA-accredited dental or dental hygiene program.

The second scholarship won by Valenzuela is the Burch Scholarship for Equity-Centered Leadership, sponsored by the Board of the American Dental Hygienists’ Association Institute for Oral Health.

The ADHA Institute for Oral Health’s Burch Scholarship is awarded to a licensed dental hygienist from a socially disadvantaged population that is underrepresented in the dental hygiene profession, who seeks to further their educational opportunities to create new career pathways that remove barriers to access to care.

Each scholarship will be applied to the 2024-25 academic year.

These scholarships add two more of monetary support for Valenzuela, who received two scholarships from the American Dental Education Association at the 2024 ADEA Annual Session & Exhibition held in March.

Pivoting from dental practice to teaching, Valenzuela says that while she enjoyed her time in the clinics, she slowly realized that her favorite part about it was the teaching aspect. As part of the Master of Science in Dental Hygiene Program, she is now able to see the teaching curriculum and the teaching skills that are a part of the courses being performed in a clinical setting.

During her time as an undergraduate at the School of Dentistry, Valenzuela was nominated by faculty and received the 2020 Outstanding Dental Hygiene Student in Texas Award. She was also named an Albert Schweitzer fellow and completed a fellowship with TIRR Memorial Hermann with a year-long project that focused on oral hygiene education of spinal cord injury patients and their caregivers.