Meet our Team
Dr. Camila Pacheco Pereira
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR & ORAL AND MAXILLOFACIAL RADIOLOGIST SPECIALIST
Dr. Pacheco-Pereira, DDS, MBA, MSc, MS, PHD, FRCDC, is one of the few board-certified oral and maxillofacial radiologists in Alberta. She leads the Advanced Imaging Centre at the University of Alberta.
With over 90 peer-reviewed publications, her research focuses on 2D and 3D imaging applications, knowledge translation in dental imaging, and metrics related to patient satisfaction with oral health care. Embracing innovation and collaboration, she explores the use of cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) and alternative imaging tools to advance digital dentistry. Pacheco-Pereira is committed to integrating augmented intelligence into dental imaging, promoting knowledge translation in oral radiology, and advancing education by emphasizing imaging justification and the appropriate use of imaging modalities in dentistry.
Pacheco-Pereira completed her dentistry studies in Brazil. After finishing dental school, she slowly but surely realized that her strong interests were related to oral health diagnosis. Accordingly, she completed an oral radiology specialty program. Her interests are also related to health services delivery, which led to the completion of her masters in business administration with a specialization in health management. This experience opened her mind to the administrative side of dentistry.
Having been in Alberta since 2013, Pacheco-Pereira completed a masters in dentistry program at the University of Alberta and she is proud to be an alumni of the school where she teaches today. She is involved with DDS, dental hygiene, undergraduate and graduate programs in addition to the radiology clinic.
Her interest is focused on generating good translational research. With a substantial number of scientific papers in evidence-based dentistry, patient and student satisfaction/blended learning, and oral maxillofacial related topics, Pacheco-Pereira is an active and awarded member of academia. She is a collaborator in a number of dental evidence-based studies to systematic review topics that need to be translated to the practitioner. Another research interest of hers is the variation in the trabecular bone pattern in conventional and advanced imaging.
Dr. Fabiana Almeida
Clinician Scientist & Assistant Professor
Dr. Almeida, DDS, MSc, PhD, is a clinician scientist and assistant professor at the Mike Petryk School of Dentistry, University of Alberta. She teaches oral radiology to both undergraduate and graduate students and also serves
Almeida's research program focuses on advanced imaging technologies (CBCT, MRI and Ultrasound) and innovation to improve the diagnosis of oral and maxillofacial conditions. She is increasingly focused on AI-driven image analysis and has led the development of an AI model to assist in identifying TMJ disorders in MRI images. By integrating clinical diagnosis expertise with innovation, her research aims to enhance diagnostic imaging, support clinical decision-making, and ultimately improve patient outcomes in oral health care.
Dr. Hollis Lai
Professor
Dr. Lai, PhD, MBA, MEd, is a professor with the Mike Petryk School of Dentistry and is a university alumnus of the Faculty of Education and the School of Business.
His research interest is in analytics and psychometrics. His team has developed many learning solutions used throughout the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry. He co-developed the method for automatic time generation that is now being used by testing agencies around the world.
He splits his time between the Undergraduate Medical Education office and the ERSU. His research interests include developing intelligent applications, learning sciences, and adopting analytic methods in oral health research. His focus within the Unit is to engage in and support educational research, with a focus on quantitative methods, analytics, and machine learning.
In 2024, Lai was recognized with the David Cook Award for contribution to medical education at the University of Alberta and in 2016 was awarded the annual award by the National Council for Measurement in Education.
Dr. Manuel Oscar Lagravère Vich
Director, orthodontic graduate program
Dr. Lagravère, DDS, MSc, PhD, was born in Lima, Peru, where he completed his degree in dental science (2000) and masters in science (2003) at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia.
After this, he moved to Edmonton to pursue a PhD in orthodontic which was completed in July 2009 in the University of Alberta. Since then, Lagravère has moved in the faculty ranks being promoted to tenured-professor in orthodontics since July 2023 where he is involved in teaching orthodontics to undergraduates and postgraduates students.
During his time in teaching and doing research, Lagravère has won several awards and has published over 160 papers in important scientific journals. In July 2025, he became the director of the orthodontic graduate program at the University of Alberta.
Presently, he runs several clinical trials involving orthodontic treatments and its impact on airway, skeletal, and dental changes. In several of these trials, he works jointly with universities from the US, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Mexico. His research mainly focuses on the areas of maxillary expansion, bone-anchored mechanics, and three-dimensional analysis. He is also the Director of the Applied Oral Health Research Unit.
Dr. Nazila Ameli
Clinical Assistant Professor
Dr. Ameli, DDS, MSc, PhD, is an accomplished orthodontist with over seven years of experience as a faculty professor. She earned her PhD in 2024, focusing on the applications of artificial intelligence in dentistry and oral health.
Since beginning her doctoral program in 2021, Ameli has published seven peer-reviewed papers specifically in the fields of machine learning and AI in dentistry and is involved in more than seven AI-related projects. Her research bridges both text and image data analysis to advance diagnostic and clinical decision-making in oral health care. Ameli currently serves as an academic teaching staff member at the University of Alberta, where she contributes to both clinical education and research.
In addition, she has served for two consecutive years as the president of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Student Society (AIMSS), leading initiatives to integrate cutting-edge technologies into healthcare and enhance patient outcomes.
Dr. Tahereh Firoozi
Assistant Clinical Professor
Dr. Firoozi, PhD, is an assistant clinical professor at the Mike Petryk School of Dentistry at the University of Alberta. She earned her first PhD in applied linguistics in 2019 and later completed a second PhD in measurement, evaluation, and data science (MEDS) in 2023.
Firoozi's interdisciplinary background in linguistics and data science has shaped her expertise in computational linguistics and transformer-based approaches to text mining. She was also awarded a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship by Alberta Innovates at the Mike Petryk School of Dentistry. Her current research focuses on the application of transformer-based models in dental and medical text mining, as well as their use in health professions education.
