This associate professor has been proclaimed “Queen of Radiology” and “The Selfie Queen” by her students and colleagues. The former reflects her teaching excellence while the latter reflects this hard-learned lesson: Ordinary days feel extraordinary when you take a moment to appreciate the fact that you’re smiling. A breast-cancer and leukemia survivor, she now conducts national and international lectures, all or some of whose proceeds are donated to St. Jude Children’s Cancer Research Hospital and MD Anderson Cancer Center.

“My sister is an endodontist, my cousins are all dentists, one of my aunts is a dentist—so basically we have a mini–dental convention when we get together.”

“Going through treatments, finding a bone- marrow donor, returning to school to relearn the old knowledge and completing new courses and graduating residency. Surviving it all was nothing short of a miracle.”

The six monitors in her office, which she says draw comparisons to NASA’s Mission Control.

“The very-near-future introduction of artificial-intelligence algorithms in dental radiology software.”

“Give back any way you can, as small or large as you can.”