I qualified in Cairo in 2008 and learned to restore teeth the way prosthodontics was taught almost everywhere at the time: reduce, replace, rebuild. Most of my work was implants and fixed prosthodontics. But every crown I prepared removed tooth structure the patient would never grow back, and I could not stop asking how much of it had actually been necessary.
I kept asking questions.
When replacing a missing tooth, did we always need to prepare the neighbouring teeth extensively? In the esthetic zone, was a titanium implant abutment always the best solution? Alternatives existed. What I wanted to understand was something more important: when could I trust them, where were their limits, and what evidence should guide the decision?
So I decided to look for that proof myself.
In 2013 I joined the Department of Prosthodontics at Kiel University and began investigating these questions directly. My early research focused on ceramic implant-abutment concepts as alternatives to standard titanium ones. At the same time I became increasingly interested in adhesive dentistry, and in how modern bonding could allow us to restore teeth and smiles while preserving more of their natural structure.
The objective was never to prove that the newest or least invasive option was automatically the best one. It was to understand what works, what does not, for whom, and under which conditions. Research gave me something I had been looking for since those early clinical years: the ability to question a treatment not only from experience, but with data.
It made me more careful.
What the data changed is what I can offer a patient. Because I have tested these materials myself, I can put a genuinely wide range of options on the table, including those that preserve more of the natural tooth, and explain honestly where each one has its limits.
This is not theory. The esthetic and minimally invasive treatments I began providing once I had my own data behind them are still in function today, some of them for more than 10 years. Patients who do not live near me receive personal follow-up and aftercare through a network of partner practices, so that their care continues where they live, not only where I work.
Twenty-four publications and a Habilitation later, the answers are clearer. They are still not finished. Part of that work now continues through the doctoral candidates I supervise, on questions in adhesive dentistry, dentin management and restorative treatment where clinically relevant uncertainty still remains.
My work with Kuraray Noritake Dental added another perspective: how high-quality dental materials are developed, tested and brought to market. Dental materials sit at the interface between scientific evidence, clinical application and industry. That role taught me to look at a material not as a product, but to ask what its properties actually mean in a clinical situation.
Today I approach the same questions from four connected directions.
- In my private practice I plan treatment together with the patient, discussing the options, their limits and the follow-up, which can be arranged in several countries.
- At Kiel University and in the Master of Esthetic Dentistry at Goethe University Frankfurt I teach the clinical decisions and the evidence behind them.
- At LMU Munich I research restorative materials and what their properties mean at the chair.
- And my industry experience gives me an additional view of how materials, research and professional education interact.
That combination is also what I bring to advisory work, with universities, scientific organisations and manufacturers, where the task is usually to connect what the evidence shows with what is realistic at the chair, and to help move restorative dentistry a step further.
This connection between science and clinical practice is also why education has become such an important part of my work. For more than 15 years I have lectured internationally at highly reputable universities, congresses and professional courses, teaching in lecture, hands-on and live-treatment formats.
As an elected member of the Council of the European Prosthodontic Association, and through my work in several societies for prosthodontics and esthetic dentistry, I try to contribute something to how restorative dentistry is practised.
The result of all of this is The Esthetic Compass: an evidence-based, clinically straightforward approach that runs from a facially driven smile design to the final bond, built on what the evidence supports, and honest about where it ends.
My work has changed considerably since 2008. The question behind it has not: how can we achieve the result a patient needs while preserving as much as we reasonably can, and how do we know that the treatment we choose deserves our trust?
I am still working on that answer.