Profiles in Partnership: Dentist-Technician Teams: My Mentors in Dentistry

By Burney Croll, DDS

I’ve been a practicing prosthodontist for the last 50 years, graduating from the SUNY School of Dentistry in 1968 and receiving my Certificate in Prosthodontics from Tufts University in 1972. Though my mentors in my formative years were mostly dentists, the common thread among those teachers was that they worked every day with a dental technician they knew and respected. Each dentist-technician team had a common knowledge and appreciation for contributions made by the other.

One of my first mentors was Dr. Milton Brown, a U.S. Navy educator and prosthodontist who taught at the Navy dental school in Bethesda, MD, before becoming the Director of the C&B department at SUNY. He brought with him a technician, Robert Caggiano, CDT, who worked with undergraduate students to teach the metal and ceramic technology that was the core of fixed prosthetics...