The success for an experienced surgeon is to see that his knowledge, skills, experience and lifelong learning is being passed to next generation of young doctors. In pursuit of this, many doctors document their experience in the form of research publications and opinion pieces. Our Hospital Director, Prof SM Balaji also continuously documents his experience in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery and dentistry in the form of publications. He often documents his unique procedures, his modifications and approach and willingly shares them on several platforms. His works has been archived at several repositories including PUBMED CENTRAL, SCOPUS, RESEARCHGATE. Many young surgeons and researchers across India and world access and refer his publications for their research and cite Prof. S. M. Balaji work in their works.

Career 360, (https://www.careers360.com/) a professional mentoring company that helps students to take informed decision for choosing career, recently undertook a valiant effort to identify most influential researchers in each professional stream across India. Our Director, Prof. S. M. Balaji was judged to be one of ten top most leading dental professionals in terms of research output in India.

The selection was based on a composite score generated by evaluating your academic output in SCOPUS indexed journals for the year 2015-17, citation count and h-index. The weights for output, citation and h-index are 33.5, 31.6, and 34.9% respectively. This was arrived at by averaging of differential weights assigned by a postal ballot from the top 20 academics of Indian origin including Innovation Guru Prof. R A Mashelkar, celebrated corporate advisor cum academician Prof. Nirmalya Kumar, Harvard Business School Dean Dr Nitin Nohria, renowned academician and institution-builder Dr Pritam Singh, and National Law University Bangalore Vice-Chancellor Dr R Venkata Rao.

Prof. S. M. Balaji’s contribution to the field of dentistry and dental research is acknowledged by a private foundation in a public forum