Chair and professor of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology (OMR) at the University of British Columbia (UBC), David MacDonald was instrumental in the establishment of the first wholly digital dental radiology faculty and its infection control and CBCT in Canada over two decades ago. His continued interest in infection control in radiology since the 2003/4 SARS pandemic led to his current evidence-based phosphor plate bagging system and his lead authorship of the American Academy of OMR’s COVID-19 guidelines published in a leading dental Elsevier journal in January 2021, as well as an update in a leading dental Wiley journal in 2022. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers on the most frequent and important diseases of the face and jaws. The literature of most of his papers was systematically reviewed based on a consecutive case series of the South Chinese. Each systemic review compared the clinical and radiological outcomes of treatment of four global ethnicities: Western, East Asian, Sub-Saharan African and Latin American. Other lesions which, though they arise outside the jaws, are related to his primary areas of dental interest are Barrett’s esophagus, scleroderma, calcified carotid arteries and currently, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, with its particular prevalence in East Asians and their diasporas. In addition to both editions of his successful Wiley textbook on OMFR, he is the lead author of the CBCT diagnosis chapter of Springer’s CBCT ‘bible’.
