A Passion for Community Health

Double alumna Vanak Huot grew her passion for prevention into a career caring for thousands at Tufts University.

Scholarship recipient Vanak Huot, RDH, MPH, MS ’15, has built an impressive career in public health and higher education, using her dental hygiene degree as a launch pad to two advanced degrees and her current role as Associate Director of Quality Improvement and Risk Reduction at Tufts University.

Huot was already working at Tufts in another position when, in 2013, she made the bold decision to leave full-time work and pursue her first college degree: the three-year Bachelor of Science in Dental Hygiene–Accelerated program at the Forsyth School of Dental Hygiene. She transferred in for the final two years after working full time and completing her prerequisite courses at night to qualify for admission. She relied on savings and student loans to cover tuition and was reassured when she received a $500 award from the Laura Chan Endowed Scholarship Fund.

“Every penny counted back then,” she recalls. “It was my senior year and I remember thinking, ‘Thank goodness. This is one less thing that I have to worry about when I graduate.’ That scholarship gave me hope that I could continue on with my education and not be so stressed about borrowing money.”

Her favorite class, Community Oral Health, revealed the barriers many patients face in accessing affordable care, and it left a lasting impression.

“I would hear stories about people taking a second mortgage just to see the dentist,” she recalls. “Seeing that need led me to research how I could take my dental hygiene education into public health.”

After graduating from Forsyth, she enrolled in the inaugural cohort of the Master of Public Health (MPH) program at MCPHS to expand her skills.

“I’ve always wanted to know what happens when a patient doesn’t show up for their appointment,” she explains. “Why didn’t they show up, and what are the repercussions for them and their community?”

That curiosity led her back to Tufts for her next role, gathering and analyzing data for its dental school on obstacles faced by its patients, such as language barriers and transportation challenges.

The position helped her discover a love of data, which in turn inspired her next degree: an MS in Health Informatics and Analytics from Tufts University School of Medicine. Today, she applies her combined public health and analytical expertise to protect the health and safety of the Tufts community.

Huot notes that her work in safety and risk reduction is ongoing, reflecting the continuous effort required to protect the well-being of the university community.

When colleagues ask how a dental hygienist ended up developing risk mitigation plans, Huot has a ready answer.

“I tell them: dental hygiene is prevention,” she says. “In prevention, we’re always assessing risk. When a hygienist asks, ‘Are you brushing twice a day?’, that’s an assessment. Those are transferable skills. How you apply one set of knowledge to another is just creativity.”

Despite the demands of her full-time role, Huot spends her Saturdays treating dental patients at a practice in Brookline, Massachusetts.

“They make fun of me all the time because there’s a ‘Vanak only’ column of patients,” she says, laughing. “I’m booked out six months to a year because the patients who want to see me know I’m only there on Saturdays.”

That dental practice includes a former student of Huot’s whom she mentored while serving as an adjunct faculty member at Forsyth. Though she has stepped away from that role, she continues to teach in the MPH program, reflecting her commitment to community health.

Huot says that her experiences as a student, faculty member, and staff, and throughout her professional and personal life, have shown her how essential mentorship is to growth and purpose. She has remained closely connected with mentors from her academic programs who continue to inspire her, and she now finds great fulfillment in mentoring others as they navigate their own paths in public health and higher education.