CHER Director, Julie Baldwin, is part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers awarded a grant from the Arizona Biomedical Research Commission to investigate why Arizona preschoolers suffer from tooth decay at a much higher rate than the national average. Rural northern Arizona, in particular, has a troublingly high rate of tooth decay among preschoolers aged 2 to 5 years. The team will collaborate with SMART Smiles and First Things First to sequence the genomes of bacteria collected from plaque samples from about 400 patients. The project’s Principal Investigator, Dr. Viacheslav Fofanov, will lead the effort.