The program is forty-eight months in length and structured to qualify the Resident for specialty examination and certification by the American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. As admission criteria, students are required to have demonstrated good personal character, academic achievement and the abilities and desire to successfully complete an advanced Residency Training Program. Acceptance into the program does not insure advancement to successive years, or specialty certification. Residents who demonstrate satisfactory academic performance, good surgical judgment and acceptable professional and moral character are allowed to advance to the successive years of training and subsequent satisfactory completion of the Advanced Educational Training Program in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery.

The training program is designed to provide continuous, progressive clinical and didactic experience for the resident. The way we achieve this is by all of us being a participant in the “circle of knowledge” in that each resident is responsible for training their junior resident and each junior resident should find their immediate senior as a resource of knowledge and experience. The aim of the program is to insure that each Resident attains the clinical and surgical skills, knowledge and sound judgment which will allow him or her to enter specialty practice with confidence, sensitivity and competence.

In order to provide a diverse surgical experience to practice the full-scope of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, we have added several part-time and volunteer surgeons to our faculty, most of whom are Harbor-UCLA OMFS alumni. To highlight a few, Dr. Julian Wilson (alumni-’13) completed a TMJ fellowship at Kaiser Permanente, Sunset and continues to be the premiere TMJ surgeon for all of Southern California Kaiser Hospitals. Dr. Husam Elias, after completing his dual degree training at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland Ohio, completed a cosmetic surgery fellowship at the Inland Cosmetic Surgery Center in Rancho Cucamonga, CA.  We believe that with the expansion of our faculty to include part-time and volunteer faculty, our residents will get the best surgical experience, even in a county setting.