Sreenivas Koka’s professional raison d’etre is to help patients with badly broken down mouths and who hail from all walks of life reclaim their self-esteem and self-confidence. For many patients, decayed or rotting teeth and a dilapidated smile represent a past that may have come from being born to a difficult life or the result of life decisions that cannot be undone and which had devastating consequences. For these patients who are mentally broken because they are dentally broken, the “replacement of missing teeth” is a technical description of a process of dental rehabilitation. . Yet, it is what the teeth represent that really matters; the culmination of a journey back from the brink to engaging again with society on their own terms. There is a special sense of fulfillment when a patient with a new smile looks in the mirror and exults “I am back in the world!”

Sreenivas Koka is a dentist specialist in prosthodontics – that field of dentistry that focuses on replacing missing teeth using dental implants and different kinds of dental prostheses. He has a CV filled with a constellation of academic and clinical accomplishments that are carefully selected and extolled here to make him look good: He graduated from the University of Michigan School of Dentistry at the age of 22; he also has an MS in Prosthodontics (Michigan), a PhD in Medical Sciences (Nebraska) and an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He is currently the interim Chair of Restorative Dentistry at UCLA and a Clinical Professor in Advanced Prosthodontics at Loma Linda University. In previous years, he has been the Chairman of Dental Specialties and Professor of Dentistry at the world famous Mayo Clinic, the President of the Academy of Prosthodontics, and has published over 100 scientific manuscripts and book chapters. His hobbies include thinking and running, his role models are his wife, Dot, sisters, Parvathi and Anuradha, and his friends Yosh Ameku, Bruce Bavitz, Jim Hodge, Phil Sheridan, Tom Salinas, Victor Montori and Naser Ammash. His sporting idols are Sir Donald Bradman and Glenn Hoddle.