Students Alaa Dagher and Mirna Deif joined a DDS students training program at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Toronto during the summer of 2014.

The students arrived in Toronto on time and started their research training program immediately.

They worked hard and were efficient and very busy throughout the period they spent training and they followed a professional conduct and represented the University well throughout the program.

The research training program consisted of the following:

• Conducting Medline searches using U. of T. library facilities on two pertinent topics: Light-polymerization of resin composite restoratives and radiopacity of none-metallic restoratives.
• Retrieving, reading and analyzing selected papers.
• Tutorial with MARC-Simulator for light polymerization.
• Dental office visits with PhD-candidate to conduct light polymerization measurements as part of an ongoing research program on quality of resin composite restorations made in private dental offices in the greater Toronto area.
• Conducting mechanical testing of composite specimens prepared ad private dental offices in the form of Knoop surface hardness measurements and diametral tensile strength tests.
• Participation in designing of an in vitro research project on radiopacity of a group of new bulk-fil composite restoratives.
• Specimen preparation for the above research project.
• Creating radiographic digital images of the specimens for determination of aluminum equivalency values.
• Use of new computer program (ImageJ software) to calculate image pixels.
• Calculation of means and SDs and introduction to statistical data analyses.
• Preparation of an abstract summarizing findings of the study.
• Submission of the abstract to the International Association for Dental Research for presentation at the upcoming annual meeting due to take place in Boston, USA, in March 2015.

Drs. Wafaa El-Badrawy and Amani El-Hadary participated in supervision of the work of the students and their contributions were most appreciated.