10 Under 10: Georgia dentist carries torch of dental family legacy into the future

Zerita Buchanan, D.D.S., is a fourth-generation dentist. A true American story, Dr. Buchanan carries both her dental and Historically Black College and University family legacies with pride as she shapes her future.

“The dental legacy began on my mother’s side of the family. My dad gets a lot of attention now because I work with him, but it all started on my mother’s side,” said Dr. Buchanan, a 2024 ADA 10 Under 10 Award recipient.

In 1923, her maternal great-grandfather, Dr. John Benny Thompson Sr., a native of Monroe, Louisiana, graduated from the Meharry Medical College School of Dentistry in Tennessee. At that time, Meharry Medical College and Howard University were the only dental schools accepting African American applicants.

Shortly after graduation, he moved back to Monroe and began practicing public health dentistry in his community. When his son, Dr. John Benny Thompson Jr., graduated from Meharry in the 1950s, he opened a family dental practice in Seattle. That practice was a fabric of the community until 1989, when her grandfather suddenly passed away.

When her grandfather passed, Dr. Buchanan’s father, Brian Buchanan, D.D.S., was in dental school, and he reopened the same family dental practice two years later. The Buchanan family stayed in Seattle until 2005 when they moved back to Atlanta where Dr. Brian Buchanan opened a new practice, Dental Dreams.

 

Georgia is a special place for the Buchanan family. That's where Dr. Brian Buchanan grew up and he and Dr. Buchanan's mother, Rahmelle C. Thompson, D.V.M., attended neighboring Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Morehouse College and Spelman College, both in Atlanta. Ultimately, Atlanta is where Dr. Buchanan fostered her personal and professional development.

So what was it like growing up with a family of dentists?

“They were pretty strict on what we did eat and drink,” Dr. Buchanan said of her parents. “We never had sugary drinks and soda. Being a child in a dental family wasn’t overbearing, but we did have some rules.”

When it came time for undergraduate studies, Dr. Buchanan knew she would carry on the family legacy of attending a Historically Black College and University.

“I was dead set on going to Spelman. It was my dream,” she said. “The National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C. has a section dedicated to HBCUs and each institution has a quote. Spelman’s quote says that they supply you with not only academic excellence, but they pour into your soul. It’s really where I found myself and became a woman.

“Spelman introduces you to what it means to be a Black woman in this world, and they give you four years of being safe from racism and being the voice of the Black community. It’s such a powerful place to go to college. I grew up in Seattle and the diversity there is not as great as in Georgia, and so when I got to Georgia, I was like, ‘This is Black girl magic,’ this is what I’ve been waiting on my whole life. I tell everyone that Spelman changed my life.”

Before college, Dr. Buchanan knew she wanted to work in the medical field, but dentistry wasn’t her first choice.

“My parents didn’t really pressure me to go into dentistry; they let us explore everything,” she said. “I actually fought dentistry for a long time. I loved science, so I thought I would go to medical school. I knew from an early age what I did not like in life and what I did like. Science, biology — I loved. I wanted to deal with the human body.”

 

However, during college, she saw firsthand from friends who were on the medical school track that it wasn’t going to be a fit for her.

“Being a physician and dealing with hierarchy within a hospital system probably wouldn’t give me the autonomy I wanted and needed in a career, so I settled on dentistry and I love it,” Dr. Buchanan said. “I think it’s the perfect career for me because I can set my schedule. I make my own decisions at work, I run my own business, hire my own staff, and dentistry has a very psychological component. I get to build relationships with my patients, help with their self-esteem, learn about them and their families, so I love the social aspect of it.”

Spelman College is a liberal arts school, so there wasn’t a dedicated pre-dental program, but as Dr. Buchanan said, “Spelman is really where I learned the power of mentorship.” Spelman alumni take mentorship seriously. The expansive network of alumni around the U.S. working in dentistry or health professional positions allowed Dr. Buchanan to get dental and research experience during the school year and summers as she prepared for dental school.

“I was dead set on going to Meharry Medical College for dental school. It was my No. 1 school,” she said.

But then during a campus recruiting session, Dr. Buchanan met a recruiter from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and found that dental school program to be a better fit for her.

“UNC had some practical things that really drew me to it,” she said. “First, it had every single dental specialty, and I liked that because I could work with a variety of residents. Second, when we did our interviews there, its Student National Dental Association took all of the Black students out to lunch. It was a direct representation of the culture and community that the school fostered. North Carolina also has a lot of Black history — for example, the sit-ins in Greensboro, a strong history of social justice and a large concentration of HBCUs.”

Telling her family about her decision to attend UNC and not Meharry wasn’t easy.

“It was a tough conversation for my mom because my mom is a very sentimental person,” Dr. Buchanan said. “She didn’t know anything about North Carolina, but she was supportive in part because it wasn’t too far away from our tight-knit community in Atlanta.”

 

UNC also provided Dr. Buchanan and the other dental students with a unique opportunity to get early exposure to hands-on clinical experience.

“You start working in clinics in your first year,” she said. “We were reminded why we were starting the program, and it helped me stay motivated. It was a test run at the experience of being in private practice. I was able to get strong hands-on experience early on, such as surgically inserting an implant, which was amazing.”

Dental school is demanding on its own, and Dr. Buchanan said the combination of studying and getting early hands-on clinical experience was a challenge.

“It was hard to juggle coursework and seeing patients. I remember feeling like this work is not challenging, it’s the volume of work that’s challenging because it’s so much in a short period of time,” she said.

It wasn’t until her third year of dental school that she discovered how she learns and studies best to compartmentalize and maximize her time.

As dental school was wrapping up in North Carolina, Dr. Buchanan was ready to get back to Atlanta. She knew North Carolina was only a stop along the way and her professional and personal future was in Atlanta near her family.

When she returned to Atlanta, her father also helped her prep for the Georgia board certification process. A few months after graduation, Dr. Buchanan was licensed and stepped into her father’s practice.

For 10 years, Dr. Buchanan and her father worked together at Dental Dreams, providing general dentistry services to the Atlanta community. She said the experience was fulfilling, but there was something in the back of her mind that made her think, “’What else is out there for me?’ I knew there was something more out there for me, but I couldn’t name it.”

 

The COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing need for dental care during changing public health guidelines helped her find that clarity. 

"The world is shutting down, but people are still calling my office to schedule because regardless of what happens, if you’re in discomfort, you need immediate attention,” Dr. Buchanan said. “I knew my services would always be needed, so I started thinking, ‘I love my career, but every day is not promised. What am I going to do with my life?’”

Then, Cynthia Hodge, D.M.D., one of Dr. Buchanan’s mentors, called her about a one-year fellowship opportunity to attend the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The fellowship was offered through the Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Minority Health Policy, which is focused on influencing health equity. Each year, it is awarded to a handful of physicians and one dentist. Under this program, the dental fellowship is named after the first African American interim dean at Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Joseph L. Henry, D.D.S., Ph.D. In 2022, Dr. Buchanan was the recipient of the Joseph L. Henry Oral Health Fellowship in Minority Policy.

“In researching more about the fellowship, its namesake and mission, I felt like it matched perfectly for me and issues I cared about,” she said. “So I applied, got in and had to sit my dad down and say, ‘Hey, I am going to move to Boston.’”

Dr. Buchanan said returning to school after years of professional work was a completely different but great experience.

“When you are already a professional and you’ve been practicing, I was able to engage in another way and just soak everything up around me,” she said. “I also had real-world experience working with patients and the economics of health care, disparity and access to care. The curriculum really made sense to me because of that lived experience.”

Dr. Buchanan’s experience at Harvard led her to see a different path for her future.

“At Harvard, I saw that there is more out there in the field of dentistry,” she said. “I met people who transitioned from patient care to consulting and working with health tech companies, etc. I didn’t even know those opportunities were out there. But Boston gave me a catalyst to see how I can give back to the community while also advancing my career.”

 

As Dr. Buchanan approached her Harvard graduation in 2023, she was faced with the decision of what to do next.

In thinking through the next phase, she realized that in order to create new opportunities in her professional life, she had to make space for them. That meant trimming back her private practice schedule from five days a week to three.

“Now on Mondays and Fridays, I do consulting work,” Dr. Buchanan said. “I was very interested in health care, STEM, mentorship/working with students, but also now this world of business and technology. But I wouldn’t be able to do that if I didn’t stop seeing patients a few days a week. I had to create that space.”

Looking back, Dr. Buchanan said that while she was at UNC, she received some life-changing feedback from one of her mentors.

“She said to me, ‘Your thing is leadership. I see it in you,’” Dr. Buchanan said. “I’ve never had anyone really say that to me. Having someone speak life into you like that can change the trajectory of your life.”

Since then, she has made leadership a large part of her career path, and as she steps into the next phase, she is keeping her options open.

“I love clinical care, so I will always see patients,” she said. “But doing a lot of social impact work, working with brands and large companies to get back to the community through philanthropy — I want to keep doing policy work too and advocacy to benefit my community.”

Dr. Buchanan is also busy with Georgians for a Healthy Future and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, where she is the youngest and first female African American board member. She is also the assistant director of Increasing Diversity in Dentistry, which helps underrepresented minority students get into dental school. In 2022, Dr. Buchanan established the Dental Dreams LLC — Dental Assisting School after receiving the Tory Burch Foundation Women of Color Grant. Since its establishment, 25 pre-dental students from Spelman College and Morehouse College have attended the school and subsequently become certified dental assistants in the state of Georgia.

When she’s not seeing patients or working on her consulting and social impact work, Dr. Buchanan indulges in her long-standing passion for food.

“I love anything involving culinary skills. I used to have a restaurant blog when I was in college, so I love trying out new restaurants,” she said.

Dr. Buchanan also loves to travel and be active, prioritizing her health and wellness.

Learn more about the 10 Under 10 Awards program at ADA.org/10Under10 and get inspired at SmileCon's Changemakers Celebration, which will recognize this year’s 10 Under 10 Award winners and other award recipients.