The Faculty of Dentistry is pleased to announce the winner of the 2021 Outstanding Alumnus Award, Dr. Mervyn Gornitsky, DDS '53. This award recognizes and celebrates a McGill Dentistry graduate for their exceptional contributions to the Faculty and the dental profession in general.
Dr. Mervyn Gornitsky is Research Director of the Department of Dentistry at the Jewish General Hospital. He is a Professor Emeritus at McGill University, Faculty of Dentistry, and Chief Emeritus of the Department of Dentistry at the Jewish General Hospital. The dental clinic of the Jewish General Hospital has been named after him in recognition for his contribution to the development of the residency training program and dental research.
Dr. Gornitsky's distinguished careers in academic dentistry and oral and maxillofacial surgery have spanned over 50 years. He has contributed to the development of dentistry departments in Canadian hospitals, enabling millions of Canadians access to dental care that they normally could not afford. He was chair of the Hospital Dental Services Committee for Quebec for 15 years and Chair of the Council on Hospital Dental Services for the Canadian Dental Association for six years. James Lund, Dean of the McGill Faculty of Dentistry from 1995 to 2008, noted that Dr. Gornitsky "contributed more than anyone in Canada to the development of departments of dentistry in Canadian hospitals. Before Dr. Gornitsky, oral health care was rarely offered in university teaching hospitals. Now it is the norm."
Dr. Gornitsky has been in the forefront of medical and dental research. He has authored over 63 papers on various clinical and fundamental aspects of oral medicine. His innovative work concerning the management of oral pathology in patients with AIDS and chronic hepatitis has received wide acclaim. His team developed a novel approach to facilitate bone healing around dental implants using low-intensity electrical stimulation. They were also the first to investigate the human immune response to dental caries. In 2005, Dr. Gornitsky was awarded the H. Dean Millard Prize for a scientific paper entitled “Double-Blind Randomized Placebo- Controlled Study of Pilocarpine to Salvage Salivary Gland Function during Radiation Therapy for Patients with Head and Neck Cancer.” In 2014, he was awarded the Micheline-Blain Award– Lifetime achievements and exceptional involvement in oral health research for his Oral and Bone Health Research.
Over the last 15 years, his research has focused the discovery of salivary biomarkers in Parkinson's disease and other neurological conditions, as well as evaluating the biomarkers and treatment of painful temporomandibular disorders and sleep apnea.
Yet perhaps his most important contribution to the health sciences is the Lady David Institute / Jewish General Hospital Databank for Saliva Specimens, the largest saliva databank in Canada. This saliva databank currently contains approximately 4,000 samples for the study of salivary biomarkers and is located at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research. His work has been the research foundation to detecting various other diseases such as breast cancer, COVID-19, and Alzheimer’s using salivary biomarkers.
First and foremost, Dr. Gornitsky is a teacher. By the establishment of teaching dental clinics and 50 years of teaching, he has had significant impact on creating high quality Canadian dentists. Dr. Gornitsky has been recognized for the quality of his teaching by being appointed Professor Emeritus at McGill University and being awarded Award Of Teaching Excellence – Jewish General Hospital in 2001 and 2005. He was also awarded the Teaching Recognition Award by the Faculty of Dentistry.
Dr. Gornitsky is also a humanitarian. His effort reinforces Canada’s reputation as being compassionate, empathetic, and kind. Some highlights of his humanitarian activities include the initiation and implementation of a dental hygiene program for Vietnamese refugees who were carriers of hepatitis B and establishment of a unique and highly successful dental program for the management of HIV-positive patients. The latter initiative led Dr. Gornitsky and colleagues to discover interferon alpha 2A as an effective treatment for oral Kaposi’s sarcoma, a significant malignant complication of AIDS. Also noteworthy were his efforts to raise funds and garner essential material to equip the dental department of the Bikur Holim Hospital in Riga, Latvia, which he personally visited in the role of dental consultant to enable technology transfer.
Dr. Gornitsky's distinguished career and sustained commitment to research make him an outstanding alumnus who continues to champion the McGill values with great pride, making him an excellent role model for all.