I got into dentistry in a very serendipitous way. I was originally going to become a genetic engineer and work with pharmaceutical companies to help develop drugs to treat genetic defects. And I was uniquely assigned at the National Institutes of Health down in Bethesda, Maryland my senior year, where all of the researchers on our team were dentists and decided to become PhD full-time researchers.

And they mentioned to me, hey, Rafferty, as long as you’re here, go down to Georgetown and throw in an application to the dental school and see what happens. And so I did, and the rest is history. I was lucky to go to Georgetown because they were very, very clinically and didactically situated to give us the best possible degree and confidence to go out into the world and practice the right way responsibly, and also to care for the people that we treat.

And they also instilled in us a desire to continue our education, even though the degree’s only four years. So I have been every single year since then, continuing education habits, improving my skills in various areas of implant dentistry, bone grafting, gum treatment, restorative dentistry, radiography, and even forensic pathology. I take a lot of pride in the fact that we practice the state-of-the-art dentistry with state-of-the-art equipment.

For instance, we have a three-dimensional x-ray unit that provides tremendous diagnostic advantages that conventional radiography wouldn’t provide for us. And many times we’ll use that technology to advance them to our laboratories where we can more properly custom fit crowns, bridges, implant crowns, so it adds a level of precision that we often didn’t enjoy in the past. The most rewarding aspect for me is to render care to a patient that exceeds their expectations, that provides them joy and comfort and a sense of self-confidence that they didn’t otherwise enjoy, that brings all the satisfaction a clinician works so hard to accomplish.