A dental pipeline program built for shortage areas is heading to Michigan

Planet Smilez, a nonprofit that walks middle and high school students through what a career in oral health actually looks like, says Michigan is its next stop. According to Model D, which reported the plans, the group intends to run sessions at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry and at Northern Michigan University.

The organization describes itself as a nonprofit focused on dental education and oral health awareness for at-risk communities, with a particular focus on students growing up in dental health professional shortage areas. Those are the regions, rural and urban alike, where dentists and hygienists are too few to meet demand. Michigan has plenty of them, from the Upper Peninsula and the northern lower peninsula to parts of Detroit, which makes it a natural fit for a program built around that exact gap.

The model is a single structured day inside a university dental school. Students rotate through hands-on stations, work alongside current dental students serving as mentors, and get exposed to the full range of roles in the field, not only dentists but hygienists, assistants, and surgeons. The point, the group says, is early exposure: putting young people who rarely see the inside of a clinic into the same building where the state trains its own professionals.

Planet Smilez was founded by Dr. Kathryn Pawlak, a pediatric dentist who started the organization while she was still a predental student at the University of Maryland. Her reasons were personal. As she told the American Dental Association, which named her to its 2025 list of dentists under 10 years out of school, "I grew up as a granddaughter of immigrants, and I realized really how the lack of access to dental care during their youth affected their health long term, so I was in college and I was really inspired to become a pediatric dentist."

The Michigan plans follow a symposium the group held on April 18 at the Indiana University School of Dentistry, hosted with support from the Delta Dental Foundation. Per Model D's reporting on that event, 58 high school students took part, oral health knowledge scores rose 14.2 percent over the day, and nearly 88 percent said the experience increased their interest in an oral health career. Those figures come from the program's own post-event surveys as reported by the outlet and have not been independently verified here.

Delta Dental has been the program's main backer. The funder says it has put more than 1.7 million dollars since 2023 into efforts that push school-aged children from a range of backgrounds toward careers in oral health, and it has funded Planet Smilez workshops across the country.

In Pawlak's framing, the work comes down to exposure. "I believe education and mentorship have the power to transform lives," she said in a Planet Smilez announcement, describing a goal of giving children oral health knowledge and hands-on experience early. For students in places where a dental visit is rare and expensive rather than routine, the bet is that getting them inside a working dental school changes what feels possible. Michigan is next.