Dr. Marcia Campos: Energy and empathy fuel her teaching mission

It’s a simple office, one of many rooms along a faculty corridor in the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. Yet the bulletin board filled with cards and notes, the awards, and other decorative touches radiate a special connection between faculty member Dr. Marcia Campos and her students.

“Teaching is more than a career or profession to me,” Campos says. “It’s really a mission. I try to combine passion with compassion and empathy and with being very genuine with my students. It has given me a lot of things back. When you teach, you also learn.”

Campos joined the Department of Cariology, Restorative Sciences and Endodontics as a Clinical Associate Professor in August of 2020 after two previous tenures at the school, first as a postdoctoral fellow from 2008-09 and as an adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor from 2015-16. She has a strong background in the teaching, research and clinical realms of general dentistry and oral pathology.

In the four years since returning, Campos has forged a singular bond with students. Last spring, she received the Dr. Paul Gibbons Award, an honor given to a faculty member by the graduating DDS class. The award, which provides the opportunity to deliver a speech at commencement, recognizes exceptional teaching and mentorship. It is named for a late professor and alumnus who was a national expert in prosthodontics and cleft palate treatment.

In nominating Campos, students cited traits that demonstrate her passion for teaching and student welfare: “Dr. Campos possesses the best qualities of clinician, scientist, teacher, mentor, leader and a friend. … She exhibits empathy and kindness towards students and patients. … Her energy and excitement

filled the room … She goes above and beyond to make sure the students understand the concept and help them in the best way possible … Every encounter with Dr. Campos makes you feel seen, valued and important.”

Campos teaches several classroom courses along with instructing students as they treat patients in-clinic. She teaches classes on comprehensive care and cariology for firstyear students, along with a case presentation course for fourth-year students. Her student connection also includes involvement with the school’s Global Initiatives in Oral and Craniofacial Health, a program that gives students experience treating patients in several countries around the world. Campos has co-led an annual trip to Honduras for several years. She also is the faculty lead for the dental school’s Mental Health First Aid Program, established to support the wellbeing of students, staff and faculty.

The roots of Campos’ approach to dentistry grew during her high school years in her

native Brazil. She liked science and knew she loved working and communicating with people. Her hometown of São José dos Campos had two large universities and dentistry was the main medical program. She’d had good dentists as a child and she liked the challenge of dentistry.

The profession’s other positives quickly became evident. “The ways we can touch peoples’ lives with dentistry are phenomenal,” Campos says. “We work in such close proximity with our patients. You really need to build a level of trust. This drew me. With simple procedures we can change someone’s life.”

As she was completing her dentistry training, she also had her first taste of teaching. To help pay for her dental school courses, she taught high school classes at night in biology, chemistry and Portuguese. “I started to feel a calling,” she said.

She graduated from dental school in Brazil in 2001 and began private practice. She earned a master’s and PhD in Brazil, and became involved in research as an oral pathologist, focusing on oral cancer. In 2008, she came to the U-M dental school for a year-long post-doctoral fellowship, then returned to Brazil and continued to develop her interest in teaching. “That is when I really found my passion,” Campos said. “You can be good at a lot of things. I was doing a good job in research, getting grants and everything. But I was not as fulfilled as when teaching.”

The next step in her career path came in 2015 when she and her husband, Bruno Cavalcanti, also a dentist whom she met in dental school, got a call from the U-M dental school. Cavalcanti, an endodontist, was hired as an assistant professor, and Marcia, who had just had their second child, returned to U-M as an adjunct clinical assistant professor from 2015-16.

Another career step presented itself in 2016, when the two were recruited by the University of Iowa dental school. They didn’t want to leave U-M, but in order to teach oral pathology in this country, Campos would need to redo her residency program in the U.S. “It was too good of an opportunity to pass up,” she said.

The couple were faculty at UI for four years. Calvacanti was director of endodontics for undergraduates and Campos taught general dentistry and comprehensive care. In the end, Campos was doing so much general dentistry teaching – and loving it – that she decided not to do the pathology residency program at Iowa.

When the U-M dental school came calling again in 2020, she and Cavalcanti were happy to settle back into Ann Arbor with their two children (currently ages 13 and 11).

“I learned a lot in Iowa,” Campos says, “but coming back here was a really good feeling.”

Campos believes her empathetic approach to teaching comes in part from her family and in part from growing up in São José dos Campos, a cosmopolitan city in southeast Brazil about 60 miles from São Paulo. Her hometown is about six times the size of Ann Arbor, but the two have a similar diversity with many residents from around the world. “My mother and two of my sisters are social workers and I have witnessed, early on, how much social factors can impact someone’s life. My other sister is a psychologist, which also brought deeper humanistic concepts to my life and character-building.”

Among those concepts is knowing every one of U-M’s 400-plus dental students by name, underscored by a message a student sent last year. “Thank you for calling me by my name and making me feel seen every time you interacted with me,” the student told Campos. “This past year, I was having a really hard time adapting to a new reality as a (firstyear) student and you really helped me to not give up and to keep going.”

Another revealing story about Campos’ connection with students arose from a difficult moment, when she had to fail a student in a clinic test case, just months before graduation.

“Sometimes you have to fail a student,” Campos explained. “But even then I try to say what you can do to improve and how to get better.” The two sat down and talked about how to overcome the problems the case presented.

Weeks later, on the day of commencement, the student’s father, a dentist himself, approached Campos. He expressed gratitude for how Campos mentored his daughter during a difficult moment. “The way that you did this,” he said, “you showed my daughter that failure was a part of learning. She learned so much in terms of how to overcome failure and how to treat patients.”

It’s tough love, but with a kind, caring and patient face. Campos says. “I wouldn’t do a good service to the student if I was just passing them and being nice all the time. I have to teach them. Sometimes the hard lessons, they are the very good ones.”

The awards and thank-you notes Campos receives are a testament to her personal way of teaching. “Awards are not something that I brag about, but it’s really an honor to be trusted,” she said. “As a professor, you deal with grading, lots of other things. There are politics in academics. There’s no way to avoid that. But this is what I call success.”