Dr. Marwan Fattouhi, a second-year resident, has been selected as the 2022 recipient of the David H. Wands Fellowship in Graduate Prosthodontics at the UW School of Dentistry.
This fellowship, one of the school’s top academic awards, encourages recipients to devote at least part of their time to teaching after completing the three-year residency.
Growing up in Iraq, Dr. Fattouhi thought he might follow his father, grandparents, and uncles into a career in medicine, not dentistry. “I grew up being very influenced by the impact a health care provider can have on other people’s lives,” he says.
When his family moved from Iraq to Lebanon in 2007, he studied zoology and embryology in college and was accepted into one of the country’s top medical schools. He never started, however. Instead, he and his family leaped at a chance to emigrate to the United States in 2009. He earned a degree in cellular and molecular biochemistry at the University of Texas at El Paso, then entered a dual-track DDS-PhD program at the University of Texas dental school in San Antonio.
After earning his DDS in 2018, Dr. Fattouhi practiced as a general dentist in San Antonio. He found that prosthodontics cases truly fascinated and challenged him.
“I aim to be a practitioner who is able to treat patients comprehensively,” he says, “and in order to do that, I believe that prosthodontic knowledge is a must.” That led him to the University of Washington, which his dental school mentors highly recommended as having one of the nation’s best prosthodontics programs.
After his residency, Dr. Fattouhi plans to start out dividing his time between private practice and academic dentistry. He hopes to build his own clinic and ultimately teach full time. He has already tutored other students throughout his academic career and served on the adjunct faculty at his dental alma mater after obtaining his degree.
The fellowship was created by Dr. David Wands, who completed a prosthodontics residency at the UW and taught part time on the prosthodontics faculty for 22 years.