How I Found My Way to Dental Sleep Medicine

It started with my nephew. He had autism. He had sleep apnea. The brain region that couldn't get rest connected my orthodontic training to a field I didn't know existed yet.

I was an orthodontic resident at UCLA at the time, deep in the technical work of teeth and bites — the things you'd expect an orthodontist-in-training to be focused on. But my nephew kept pulling me somewhere else: toward a brain that couldn't get the rest it needed.

My clinical director, Dr. Eun Kwon Paik, had been working with a neurologist named Dr. Ron Harper, and they were studying something that stopped me in my tracks: MRI scans of patients with sleep apnea showed smaller cerebellums. So did scans of patients with autism. The same brain region. The same pattern.

I couldn't unsee it.

That overlap — the place where my nephew lived, in a body that couldn't breathe well during sleep — pulled me toward sleep research before I knew what I was doing. I went on to a master's degree studying how low oxygen levels during sleep damage the cerebellum in neonatal rats. The work was technical, but the question underneath it wasn't: what happens to a developing brain when sleep doesn't work?

At that point, I still didn't see the connection between this research and the work I'd be doing with my hands. Dentistry and sleep medicine lived in separate worlds in my mind.

That changed when I met two people.

Stanford, and the people who built sleep medicine

Dr. William C. Dement is widely called the father of sleep medicine. He discovered REM sleep. The paper announcing that discovery was rejected five times before it was published. I think about that often — that the foundation of an entire field was built by someone willing to keep trying after five rejections.

Dr. Christian Guilleminault coined the terms “obstructive sleep apnea syndrome” and “pediatric OSA.” He recognized, before most of his peers, that poor sleep in children wasn't just a parenting problem or a phase. It was physiology. It mattered.

Both of them were at Stanford. Stanford is, in many real ways, the birthplace of sleep medicine. Being trained in that environment changed how I thought about my own field. Dentistry wasn't separate from medicine. It was a piece of it that hadn't been integrated yet.

The conversation that changed my career

Years into my practice, I started experimenting with palatal expansion devices — early versions, nothing close to what we have now. My patients kept reporting things I didn't expect: better breathing, deeper sleep, more energy.

I brought this back to Dr. Guilleminault. I thought we'd talk for thirty minutes.

We talked for five hours.

By the end of it, he looked at me and said, “Audrey, you need to show the world the possibilities.”

I've thought about those words a lot in the years since. He didn't say “publish a paper” or “go give a talk.” He said show the world — meaning, do the work, share what you find, and let other clinicians see what's possible. That sentence shaped my entire career in dental sleep medicine.

Building bridges, one institution at a time

I founded the Dental Sleep Medicine Specialty Clinics at Stanford. Stanford has no dental school. The clinic shouldn't have existed, by some logics. But the need was real, and once we opened our doors, the waiting list grew to over a year. Sleep medicine fellows from one of the largest programs in the world started rotating through. For many of them, it was the first time they'd seen what dentistry could do for a patient struggling with sleep.

At the University of the Pacific, I've spent years working to make sleep disorder screening part of how we treat every new patient. We've integrated sleep medicine into the dental curriculum. We've launched a Dental Sleep Medicine Fellowship just for orthodontists — the first of its kind anywhere — where fellows split their time between Stanford and UOP, training in everything from oral appliances to craniofacial development to sleep surgery.

I founded the World Dentofacial Sleep Society to do globally what I'd been trying to do locally: build standards, share research, and bring clinicians together across borders. We've held meetings with the World Sleep Congress, partnered with organizations in Japan and the U.S., and slowly built a community of people who see what I saw at UCLA all those years ago — that sleep is foundational to health, and dentistry has a real role to play.

Why this work, still

People sometimes ask why I haven't slowed down.

The honest answer is that the work isn't done. Most children with sleep-disordered breathing are still undiagnosed. Most clinicians still don't know how to recognize the early signs. The connection between airway, sleep, and lifelong health is still treated as specialized knowledge instead of standard care.

I started this journey because I had a nephew who couldn't breathe well at night. I'm still doing it because there are millions of children — and adults — who can't either. And the field is finally catching up to what Dr. Guilleminault saw decades ago.

If you're a clinician reading this and you're starting to see the patterns in your own chair — the mouth breathing, the narrow palates, the children who can't sit still — you're not alone. The work I do now is largely about bringing more people into this field, helping them recognize what they're already seeing, and giving them the tools to act on it.

That's the journey. It started with curiosity, was shaped by mentorship, and continues because the patients keep showing up needing what we can give them.