Education & Background
DMSc, Oral Biology | Harvard Medical School | 2021
Orthodontics Residency | Harvard School of Dental Medicine | 2020
MPH | Harvard School of Public Health | 2010
BDS | University of Ibadan, Nigeria | 2006
Biosketch
Professor, Department of Diagnostic and Biomedical Sciences
Joint Appointment, Department of Orthodontics
Diplomate, American Board of Orthodontics
Dr. Bunmi Tokede is an orthodontist and dental informatics researcher who studies what medical and dental records reveal about care: who is missed, where diagnoses go wrong, and which treatments actually help. He has served as principal investigator on more than $5 million in NIH-funded research, using artificial intelligence, digital technologies, and large-scale clinical data to make dental care safer.
His research program spans the path from clinical data to better decisions. FullMouth, an NIDCR-funded project, develops natural-language-processing methods to extract clinically meaningful information from dental notes, including approaches that can run locally without sending sensitive patient data to external systems.
He leads OpenMouth, a five-year R01 from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. OpenMouth is building a shared, AI-assisted research platform that will allow clinicians and investigators without advanced data-science training to study dental care and outcomes across institutions. The project builds on BigMouth, the multi-institutional dental data repository hosted at UTHealth Houston, where Dr. Tokede directs national outreach and helps advance its scientific development.
He also leads the SmartMouth project. SmartMouth, funded by the National Institutes of Health, uses clinical informatics and digital health tools to connect prescribing data with patients’ reports of pain after dental procedures, with the goal of improving pain management. Together, these projects reflect a broader goal of his work, a learning health system, that turns data already generated in everyday dental care into useful evidence.
His research has appeared in multiple journals including The Journal of the American Dental Association, JAMIA Open, the Journal of Clinical Periodontology, and the Journal of Dentistry. He serves as an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Oral Health and on the editorial board of the Thai Journal of Orthodontics. In 2026, he delivered the opening keynote at the Academy of Osseointegration Annual Meeting, “Why Before How: Person-Centered Care in the Age of AI.” He has organized multiple national symposia on big data and artificial intelligence in dentistry, and served on the American Dental Association’s Standards Committee on Dental Informatics.
Dr. Tokede was selected as a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Fellow in 2024.
Dr. Tokede teaches pre- and postdoctoral students and mentors dental students, residents, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty in clinical research and informatics. His mentees have received national and institutional research awards and gone on to faculty and private practice careers. He also maintains an active orthodontic practice at UT Dentists.
Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Dr. Tokede graduated at the top of his class at the University of Ibadan. He earned an MPH from Harvard, completed orthodontic residency at Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and earned a DMSc from Harvard Medical School. He served on the faculty at Harvard before joining UTHealth Houston in 2021.
Working with Dr. Tokede: He welcomes dental students, residents, and postdoctoral fellows who want to ask important clinical questions using real-world data.
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