When Dr. Christian Jensen ’17 talks about his journey, from a pre-dentistry student at the University of Dayton to now, a successful dentist at a bustling practice, he keeps coming back to the same word: community.
It’s a word central to the Marianist Catholic mission at UD, where community is a way of life. For Jensen, it took root early and never let go.
Jensen didn’t arrive at dentistry in a straight line, despite his father’s long career as a dentist. Originally weighing a career in medicine, a conversation with a friend during his sophomore year at UD started shifting his thinking. What drew him to dentistry, ultimately, was something simple: the chance to see people when they’re well.
“In dentistry, we have the opportunity to see people two, three, four times a year just for routine preventative care,” he said. “It’s nice to get to treat people when they’re not necessarily sick. You feel like you get to form a better connection with them.”
After graduating from UD, Jensen completed dental school at Ohio State, then headed to Granville, Ohio, for his first associate position — where an early mentor helped shape the kind of dentist he wanted to become.
“He [my mentor] always told me: dentistry is a relationship-based profession. If you take care of someone and really show them that you care, they’re going to trust you,” Jensen said. “It kind of brought me back to some of the stuff we learned at UD, how you treat people really dictates what your success is going to be.”
That lesson followed Jensen back to Centerville, where he grew up and now practices at Dayton Dental Collaborative. He treats patients he's known his entire life – former teachers, neighbors, people who watched him grow up. “I’ll have a patient come in and it’s like, oh my gosh, you were my kindergarten teacher,” he said. “That kind of comes full circle. It’s pretty awesome.”
His commitment to service has taken him far beyond the office. Jensen volunteered at the Look Up Center in Newark, Ohio, providing free dental care to those in need. In 2023, he traveled to Panama with the UD Global Brigade, joining roughly 20 UD pre-health students to provide care to underserved communities. It was, he says, one of the most eye-opening experiences of his career.
“It just really gives you a perspective of how good we have it,” he said. “People were lining up to come see us and for so many of them, it was the first time they’d had access to any kind of dental care. Very, very humbling.”
What stayed with him just as much was the chance to mentor the students alongside him.
“For a lot of them, that was their first foray into patient care — trying to take care of someone where there's a language barrier, maybe they’re a little fearful,” Jensen said. “Just getting to see the students really grab that by the reins and take it, and getting to be a mentor and a confidant, that was really good, especially for me being so young in my career.”
Back in Dayton, Jensen channels that same energy into a guest lecture each semester for his former biochemistry professor, Madeleine DeBeer — the class he calls his favorite at UD, and the professor who wrote his letter of recommendation for dental school. He’s also working through the curriculum of the Pankey Institute, a prestigious continuing education program that he says mirrors the values he first encountered at UD.
“A lot of the core values of the Pankey Institute are actually really similar to the core values of the Marianist education at UD,” he said. “It kind of brings me back to my college days, how we’re expected to be and how we're expected to walk through life.”
For Jensen, it all comes back to community, and these days, he’s building even more of it close to home. He and his wife, Emma, are expecting their first child this fall, putting down roots in the Dayton suburb of Centerville, the same community that shaped him.
Looking ahead, he hopes to develop a program that bridges the gap between undergraduate pre-dental studies and professional school — giving UD students a realistic, encouraging look at what life in dentistry looks like before they get there.
“Having these students get a little positive reinforcement from someone who's been through it – I’m still closer in age to them than probably a lot of the dentists they'd spend time with,” he said. “UD set me up academically, socially, as a person. It just feels right to give some of that back.”
It’s exactly the spirit UD’s Joe Belle Memorial Young Alumni Award was created to recognize.