Sowmya Shetty

Dr Sowmya Shetty is a teaching focussed academic at The University of Queensland. Currently she is Senior Lecturer and serves as Discipline Lead - Oral Biosciences and as Director for Teaching & Learning at the School of Dentistry.

In her most recent role as Lecturer in Interprofessional Education at Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences, she coordinated a first year large cross faculty course called HLTH1000 (Professional, People and Healthcare) and led the HaBS faculty-based Interprofessional Education curriculum, embedded into approx. 40 undergraduate and postgraduate offerings,in 2024, within multiple programs at the faculty. This IPCP team recently won a HABS Teaching Award for Programs that Enhance Learning in 2024.

Sowmya led the Early Years Experiential Learning In Dentistry team that won a University Award for Programs that Enhance Learning (APEL) in 2023. Sowmya was part of the UQ Dental Clinical Simulation Team led by Dr Jessica Zachar which won a HABS Excellence in Clinical and Professional Skills Education (ECLiPSE) Award in 2022, for independantly designing and implementing a sustainable, novel dentally relevant emergency training module dental students at UQ. She also has a HABS Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning (COCSL) for her teaching practice and the support of learning that influences, motivates and inspires students to learn, utilising authentic simulation and engagement strategies to foster critical thinking approaches and motivate dental students towards life-long learning.

She is currently focussed on student partnerships for improving course design, assessment and feedback, and is motivated to improve clinical and observational placement experiences for students especially in interprofessional education. She is currently working on creating open educational resources in collaboration with year 1-3 course coordinators with a view to co-design custom open access textbooks for UQ dentistry courses. These are being developed with student partner contribution and feedback, via Student Staff Partnership grants through UQ.

Her research interests stemming from her PhD primarily focussed on dental materials testing, especially methodology. She worked to understand dentine permeability and its relationship to both tooth sensitivity and dentine bonding effectiveness; virtual surface mapping in tooth wear; CAD/CAM, fatigue test design and evaluation; fracture surface analysis and failure forecasting. Dental Materials is a primary focus of her teaching portfolio in the early years of the dentistry curriculum.