10 Under 10: Support of friends, family shows Chicago dentist the way

Career paths aren’t crystal clear for everyone. The road to finding your niche and establishing confidence in your career and skills can feel unknown. To get there, sometimes you need to trust in your friends, family and chosen family to guide you and shine a light on the abilities you don’t see in yourself.

That’s how Brittaney Hill, D.D.S., a recipient of a 2024 ADA 10 Under 10 Award, described her career path to pediatric dentistry and her current role as clinical associate professor and residency program director at the University of Illinois Chicago.

“When I was a kid, I originally thought I wanted to be a pediatrician,” she said. “I knew I wanted to work in the medical field, but I thought I wanted to work with kids, but I really didn’t know for sure. In school, the subjects I most enjoyed were science and math, so health care felt like a natural fit.”

Dr. Hill was primarily raised by her mother and grandmother, who both saw a bright future for her and helped her outline a path, or “formula,” that would not only help her reach higher education and have a career that provided financial stability, but also allow her to give back to her community, something Dr. Hill knew was important to her early on.

 

While the original formula would have led her to medical school, fate intervened when she started spending time after school with her grandma, who worked as a receptionist at a local dental practice. 

“I started filing the charts and doing little things around the office, and that kind of became, ‘Oh, you’re going to be a dentist,’” Dr. Hill said. “That’s how it came about, and when they said that to me, I realized, ‘Yeah, that sounds cool.’ And it just clicked.”

What started as an unofficial after-school position with Grandma became a family — both biological and chosen. Dr. Hill and her grandmother worked at the dental practice, and they were joined by other family members, who worked as dental hygienists, front desk staff and assistants. The practice owner even became Dr. Hill’s “uncle.”

“That’s how it all got started; they saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself,” she said. “I didn’t even know that it was what I wanted to do, but because they pushed me to challenge myself and meet my potential, I did it for them.”

At the advice of her uncle and family, Dr. Hill enrolled at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans to begin her dental career. But starting this journey also meant leaving her family in Memphis, Tennessee.

“It was really hard leaving my family, even though Xavier was only a five-to-six-hour drive from Memphis,” she said. “Because our family was so close, it was a really tough transition. When I was moving into the dorm, we had carloads of people coming to help me move in. That’s actually how I met one of my best friends, who was moving in at the same time. It was my first time being alone in a new city and making decisions for myself as an adult.”

 

As part of Dr. Hill’s pre-dental program at Xavier, she majored in biology and minored in chemistry, and she leaned on the school programs to help minority students get into professional schools. That “formula within a formula” allowed her to focus on school and feel as though she was working toward achieving her dental school goal.

The Xavier dental school formula included participating in the Summer Medical Dental Education Program at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where Dr. Hill could take classes and meet dental students to get a glimpse of the dental school experience. Xavier also provided her and other pre-dental students with resources for the application process — from personal statements to Dental Admission Test prep.

“When I left for Xavier, the plan after was to go to University of Tennessee Memphis for dental school, become a general dentist and take over my uncle’s practice where I worked after school,” she said. “It was comforting to have that direction as I stepped out on my own.”

But then fate intervened again.

 

As her graduation from Xavier loomed closer, Dr. Hill applied to only three dental schools. Meharry Medical College School of Dentistry and Howard University College of Dentistry were full acceptances, whereas the University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Dentistry, her first choice due to it being in Memphis with her family and friends, put her on a “conditional acceptance” status.

“With that news from UT Memphis, yes it was home, but I had to think about what that would look like,” she said. “So I thought about it and ended up going to Meharry, which was the best decision I ever made for a number of reasons. I was still on course to be a general dentist and go back to Memphis, but then I went to dental school and all of that kind of changed.”

As Dr. Hill continued to navigate the higher education landscape away from her family, choosing Meharry and staying within the historically Black college and university network made that transition easier because it kept her with a core group of health HBCU classmates who also became a chosen family.

“I mean, things got harder. Dental school is harder. But we all kind of leaned on each other and helped each other,” she said. “You want to make sure that your friend or the person you sit next to in class, you want to see them succeed too. That’s something that really stood out for me at Xavier and at Meharry.

“When I say this, people laugh, but those were the best four years of my life [at Meharry]. Because the family, the comradery, the support that you had from your classmates, upperclassmen, faculty — it was a bubble of people. Meharry is known for taking underdogs and seeing something in you that you might not. Their mission is to serve the underserved once education and residency are done. To be around people who shared the same mission as Meharry, it was special and had an impact on my career today.”

 

Even with the comradery and support of her chosen family at Meharry and her biological family in Memphis, Dr. Hill admits there were times of failure over those four years of dental school that left her with doubts about her skills. She had to face each of them, give herself grace and know that growth is a process that is not always a straight line.

“It was a lot of learning; there is a big learning curve in dental school. There was this sense of, ‘Am I really good enough for this? Do I really deserve to be here?’” she said. “But then as you continue to grow, you replace that doubt with feelings of, ‘Yes, I am going to be a great practitioner,’ and that’s because of that support system from classmates and family. I could be my best self.”

With that growing confidence and support behind her, Dr. Hill’s career and life changed again in the fall semester of her third year in dental school, when she participated in a pediatric dentistry rotation. That rotation introduced her to her mentor, Paula Coates, D.D.S., and pivoted her entire dentistry career.

“I remember meeting her and said, ‘She’s who I want to be,’” Dr. Hill said. “But this went against the formula my family and uncle helped me outline years before. I wasn’t supposed to specialize; I was supposed to be a general dentist and take over his practice. But then things changed.”

Dr. Coates took Dr. Hill under her wing and set her up with an opportunity to shadow a pediatric dentist in Atlanta, Ida Rose, D.D.S., who was a former Xavier student, over the winter holiday break.

“That’s when I knew I had to do [pediatrics],” she said. “When I did that rotation, saw how the practice in Atlanta worked, I decided that I had to specialize.”

 

So how did she tell her family that the formula was changing?

“I didn’t tell them right away because I was nervous because we’re so close and I’ve always followed the formula, so how do I tell them and what does that mean for my family?” Dr. Hill said. “It shocked them, but they were very supportive. I was nervous, and they said, ‘Why wouldn’t you just tell us? We want you to be happy. Everything that you want, go get it.’”

With her biological and chosen families’ support on this new direction, Dr. Hill could dive headfirst into pediatric dentistry, and she started looking at a residency program. She applied to six programs and knew from the start the University of Illinois Chicago was the right fit for her.

“I thought, ‘If this is the place for me, I’m going to feel it.’ And I felt it,” she said. “And it’s been great, from residency to faculty to program director.”

 

Concurrent with her two-year UIC residency, Dr. Hill was also able to complete a Master in Public Health degree at the university, thanks to the assistance of a grant. The master’s program added a third year to her studies, but she knew it was worth it and that the master’s would give her a nice balance to her dental degree.

“At the time, my plan was to finish residency and MPH, go back to Memphis and start a practice where I grew up to help the underserved and see all of these kids and change their oral health,” she said. “And then I realized through that [MPH] program, I can see thousands of kids in that clinic, but if I stay in academics and train the next generation of dentists and specialists, I can help so many more kids and have a greater impact.”

Dr. Hill said her master’s degree gave her a greater perspective on how she could contribute to her community, also opening the door for a faculty position at UIC.

But when her UIC program director and department chair approached her about a position, she had doubts.

“It was scary. To go from student to the teacher in a month, am I going to be ready? Do I know enough?” Dr. Hill said. “So I leaned on my family and mentors to see if this was the right decision for me.”

 

She built confidence in herself to take that position by teaching dental students in lab/clinic and giving lectures before residency graduation and felt an extra boost by staying within the UIC system, one she knew well and had established support in.

“I feel like throughout my life, people have seen things in me that I didn’t really see in myself at first. That is another example of it,” she said.

In addition to teaching full time at UIC, Dr. Hill is active with the Chicago Dental Society, which allows her to draw upon her master’s degree and experience to make an impact in the community and bring a new generation of dentists to service within Chicago.

When she’s not teaching or working with the Chicago Dental Society, Dr. Hill is a big Chicago and Memphis sports fan. She is even a season ticket holder for the Chicago Sky, the city’s WNBA team. Dr. Hill is also a newlywed. She married her fiancé in July, with a big wedding celebration planned in 2025.

Learn more about the 10 Under 10 Awards program at ADA.org/10Under10 and get inspired at SmileCon's Changemakers Celebration, which will recognize this year’s 10 Under 10 Award winners and other award recipients.