Henry St. Germain, D.M.D., is one of four faculty members who will receive UNMC’s Outstanding Teacher Award Thursday, April 11 at 4 p.m. during the Annual Faculty meeting in the Eppley Science Hall Amphitheater. Dr. St. Germain is the first recipient to be profiled this week in UNMC Today.
Long before designer braces came into style, Henry St. Germain, D.M.D., was using jewelry-making skills to restore people’s smiles.
The foundation for Dr. St. Germain’s dental career was his father’s jewelry and watch-making business. It would have been his business, too, had his parents not encouraged him to take craftsmanship to the next level and enter dental school.
“It’s not like we’re making jewelry in the mouth, but there’re some similar skills involved,” said Dr. St. Germain, associate professor and chairman of the adult restorative dentistry department.
Not long after graduating from Tufts University’s dental school in 1975, he joined the Navy and was inspired by a long line of mentors to start a teaching career in the service. Believing it would lead to advanced teaching positions in the Navy, he earned his master’s degree in operative dentistry from Indiana University in 1983. Then, Dr. St. Germain’s teaching career began and he worked his way through various operative dentistry teaching positions in the Navy.
“I concede that most of my students are very intelligent,” Dr. St. Germain said. “However, I have more experience, so that puts me in the ideal situation to be the teacher.”
It’s this humility that makes Dr. St. Germain’s teaching effective. Student nominators praised him for his ability to take dry, complex topics and make them understandable and interesting.
“If I can understand it, they can, too,” he said. “I relate situations I’ve had with patients and make them relevant to what they’re doing.”
After spending 20 years of dental practice and teaching in the Navy and achieving the rank of captain, Dr. St. Germain joined UNMC’s faculty in 1995.
“At UNMC there’s a high quality of students who are hard-working and motivated. I looked at other schools and didn’t sense that was there,” he said. “The students here have the work ethic built in, it’s something I don’t have to teach them.”
He started as the director of operative dentistry and steadily moved up the ranks, being named chairman of the adult restorative dentistry department in 1997. The department is the largest in the College of Dentistry and is responsible for nearly 60 percent of the four-year dental student’s curriculum.
In addition to his administrative duties, Dr. St. Germain maintains a private practice one day a week, mentors one student research project every year and actually increased his teaching responsibilities since his appointment as chairman.
In response to Dr. St. Germain’s workload, one nominator said: “The number of issues related to personnel, budget and student concerns, plus the administrative tasks assigned by his superiors, provide countless distractions to teaching.
However, his enthusiasm for teaching and dedication to students have never diminished.
Lessening his coursework wasn’t even an option for Dr. St. Germain.
“If I didn’t have time to teach, I probably wouldn’t want to be in education,” he said. “It’s almost too much at times but you know what motivates me? It’s the students.”