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Zsuzsa Horvath PhD

Associate Professor & Director, Office of Academic Career Advancement

Zsuzsa Horvath, PhD, serves as the Director of the Office of Academic Career Advancement and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Dental Public Health. She earned a PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in 2009 with a focus on education and teacher training. Throughout her career, she has been involved in curriculum development, offering teaching methodology workshops and courses, conducting teacher training, and providing services and resources to promote faculty development as it relates to teaching and curricular needs.

Within Pitt’s School of Dental Medicine, in addition to her teaching and scholarly activities, Dr. Horvath’s administrative responsibilities include overseeing the School’s faculty development program in support of the educational mission, designing and implementing the School’s mentoring program, overseeing and guiding the school’s initiative of calibration of clinical and preclinical assessment, serving as educational consultant on the School’s Curriculum Committee, offering workshops and creating resources to faculty on didactic and clinical teaching, providing orientation for new faculty, and helping others with educational research projects.

Dr. Horvath created a two-year Academic Career Track Area of Concentration (ACT ARCO) certificate program for pre-doctoral dental students to train future dental educators. The program launched in 2016 and generated great interest among dental students, resulting in much higher enrollment than initially expected. The ACT ARCO program is novel among U.S. dental schools and has gained national and international attention. Notably, the program was recently recognized with the highest award in dental education, the William J. Gies Award for Outstanding Vision – Academic Dental Institution. As part of the ACT ARCO program, she created and has taught a variety of courses on fundamentals of teaching, clinical teaching skills, career development, and educational research. The ACT ARCO program and her elective courses have filled a major gap by offering formal training to students seeking a career as a dental educator. In addition, she teaches in the school’s standardized patient program, leads discussion-based first year curricular modules.

In 2015, she was invited by a colleague to help create a novel student peer tutoring program for the School in response to an accreditation requirement to support struggling students. The program has been set up as a series of elective courses in which tutors earn academic credit for their services. Dr. Horvath provides the teacher/tutor training in the program in addition to serving as program co-director. This program has also generated interest from other dental schools.

In another recent endeavor (2015-2019), Dr. Horvath served as the director of the University of Pittsburgh Center of Excellence on Pain Education created and funded by the NIH Pain Consortium. In this capacity, she served as the principal investigator of a National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded initiative and oversaw the creation and curricular implementation of online education modules at Pitt to create educational content and training for health care providers and trainees who treat individuals with acute and chronic pain. The educational modules based on virtual cases were created by interdisciplinary teams and range from opioid misuse following wisdom teeth extraction to widespread pain and fibromyalgia. The online modules have been implemented and used at Pitt’s Health Science Schools.

Dr. Horvath is a professional coach, certified by the International Coaching Federation. She focuses on life, career and leadership coaching and offers individual and group-based career coaching to students and faculty at the school. Coaching works hand-in-hand with faculty development, and one of her first initiatives was to include a coaching component into the School’s faculty mentoring program. Utilizing a coaching approach helps faculty define their goals and express their motivation for their own career development. She has coached from junior faculty to department chairs and assistant deans on a variety of topics (transitioning into new responsibilities & leadership role, carving out time for scholarly work, navigating responsibilities, preparing for change, time management, and work life balance). In addition, she created a new course, Charting your Career in Dental Education, which essentially offers group coaching to provide support to students as they explore career plans and identify preparatory steps to self-author their future. Feedback from students has been very positive, sharing that the holistic approach of coaching and the focus on their own development as a person has had a profound effect on them and has given them space to think about their lives, not just their careers. 

Dr. Horvath has received numerous awards recognizing her contribution at the University and national levels. These include the over mentioned he William J. Gies Award for Outstanding Vision – Academic Dental Institution. The following year, she received the 2021 Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award for the creation of a visionary and innovative Academic Career Track Area of Concentration program and her knowledge of evidence-based, interactive teaching methodologies, as well as for her exemplary contributions to the University’s and school’s educational mission.

Selected Awards

Leadership and Coach Training

  • Associate Certified Coach (ACC) issued by International Coach Federation (ICF) Credentials and Standards, 2024
  • Professional Coach Certification Program, Duquesne University Palumbo Donahue School of Business (2021-22)
  • Leadership Institute, American Dental Education Association, 2020-21
  • Emerging Leader Workshop, American Dental Education Association, 2015

Selected Peer-Reviewed Publications

Selected Grants (Principal Investigator)

  • American Dental Education Association (ADEA) Council of Sections, Project Pool. The Future of Faculty Development to Support Teaching in the Oral Health Professions. 2021-2023
  • BAA-N01DA-15-4422 University of Pittsburgh, Center of Excellence in Pain Education: Pain Challenges in Primary Care. Principal Investigator, National Institute of Drug Abuse, NIH, 2015-2019. Instructional Materials Published by the NIDA (NIH)
  • Academic Career Day Retreat for Pre-Doctoral Students. Project Director, ADEA (American Dental Education Association) Gies Foundation 2014-2016 
  • Learning and Teaching together to Advance Evidence-Based Clinical Education,  Project Director, Advisory Council of Instructional Excellence/University of Pittsburgh, Office of the Provost, 2014-2015

In the News

  • Levine M. Dental program helps steer graduates toward teaching. University Times. (University of Pittsburgh), December 17, 2020. Read here.
  • Campus Spotlight: University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine. ADEA CCI (American Dental Education Association Commission on Change and Innovation)) Liaison Ledger. May 24, 2017.
  • Research Notes: New Dental Educators Program Assessed, University Times. (University of Pittsburgh), February 2, 2017.
  • Pitt SDM Targets National Faculty Shortage With New Concentration. ADEA's (American Dental Education Association) Bulletin of Dental Education: July 2016 (Volume 49, Issue 7). 
  • Levine M. Dental program targets national faculty shortage University. University Times. (University of Pittsburgh), March 31, 2016. Read here.
  • People of the Times. University Times. (University of Pittsburgh), June 26, 2014. Read here.
  • Murphy B. Provost Advisory Panel Selects 10 Proposals For Innovation Awards. Pitt Chronicle (University of Pittsburgh), June 2, 2014. Read here.
  • Levine M. Pitt’s solution to dental faculty shortage. University Times. (University of Pittsburgh), May 2, 2013. Read here.
Education & Training
University of Pittsburgh, PhD, 2009
Departments
Department of Dental Public Health

Administrative

Natalie Young
412-648-5891
NMY13@pitt.edu