Grants & Awards
IADR-PRG SUNSTAR Foundation Award
Supporting research in the field of dental and oral artificial intelligence.
What is the IADR-PRG SUNSTAR Foundation Award?
The IADR-PRG SUNSTAR Foundation Award aims to support research within the field of dental and oral artificial intelligence. It recognizes and funds impactful, timely, and innovative proposed research projects, with the aim of fostering advancements in the field, and is presented during the annual business meeting of the PRG held during the General Session & Exhibition of the IADR.
Meet the 2025 IADR-PRG SUNSTAR Foundation Award winner
Rahul Nikam, PhD
United States
Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Michigan School of Dentistry
Specializing in computational biology, microbiome analysis, and meta transcriptomics
The Story Behind the Winning Research Project
“Artificial Intelligence-Based Quantification of Life Event-Driven Shifts in the Oral Microbiome from Periodontal Health”
Periodontitis is a multifactorial disease heavily influenced by the oral microbiome, which undergoes dynamic, event-driven compositional shifts in response to systemic disease, pregnancy, antibiotic exposure, smoking, and metabolic changes. However, conventional periodontal risk assessment tools do not capture these dynamic remodeling patterns or quantify how far an individual's oral microbiome deviates from a healthy, disease-protective state.
Dr. Rahul Nikam’s project focuses on developing and validating artificial intelligence-based models that quantify and interpret life event-associated shifts in the oral microbiome relative to a defined healthy periodontal reference profile. By integrating artificial intelligence into microbiome research, the project aims to advance predictive, personalized, and prevention-focused oral healthcare.
Learn more about Dr. Nikam’s research
Using well-characterized oral microbiome datasets with rich clinical and life-event metadata, this project employs unsupervised and supervised machine-learning approaches to construct a healthy oral microbiome reference space using dimensionality reduction, quantify microbiome displacement for specific life events, and identify key microbial taxa and community features driving these shifts using explainable AI.
This work will generate quantitative, AI-derived measures of microbiome deviation associated with major life events and identify event-specific, explainable microbial signatures linked to periodontal vulnerability. By reframing periodontal risk as a measurable deviation from a healthy reference rather than a binary disease state, the study introduces an AI-driven approach for life-course oral health monitoring, early identification of at-risk individuals, and prevention-focused periodontal care.
Get to Know Dr. Rahul Nikam
Dr. Rahul Nikam is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, specializing in computational biology, oral microbiome research, and artificial intelligence. His work focuses on understanding how dynamic, life-course-driven changes in the oral microbiome influence periodontal health and disease using advanced machine learning and multi-omics approaches.