Stottler Henke’s Aurora Selected by Nation’s Leading College of Dentistry to Perform Dental Student Scheduling

Stottler Henke’s Aurora Selected by Nation’s Leading College of Dentistry to Perform Dental Student Scheduling

The New York University College of Dentistry (NYUCD) is one of the United States’ most storied dental schools. It is also the nation’s leading educator of dentists—8% of new dentists in the U.S. each year are NYUCD graduates—and boasts diverse programs in pre- and postdoctoral dental medicine with approximately 1,900 enrollees from 41 countries. In addition, many professionals return to NYUCD for Continuing Education.

Over 735 clinicians and researchers (both full and part-time), many of whom have made groundbreaking discoveries in the treatment of illnesses such as oral cancer, lead courses in prosthodontics, periodontics, implant dentistry, pediatric dentistry, endodontics, and oral/maxillofacial surgery.

For NYUCD, Aurora-DentalResident, Stottler Henke’s AI-based intelligent planning and scheduling software, was chosen to create dental student schedules—planning which students take which courses, managing clinic rotations, and balancing the complex interdependencies of curriculum, faculty availability, and resource constraints. This decision underscores both NYU’s leadership in dental education and the value Aurora brings to higher education scheduling.

Addressing Core Scheduling Challenges

Aurora-DentalResident is built to meet the unique demands of large dental schools, where each class enrolls 375–400 students and more than 1,500 DDS students are active at a time. The system tackles fundamental challenges such as:

• Guaranteeing exposure to required experiences across all lectures, labs, and clinical rotations. 
• Maintaining equity so that students carry balanced workloads even when variations exist in clinic or course assignments. 
• Staffing clinics and scheduling rooms in a way that avoids conflicts and accounts for other programs or special events. 

These are not small tasks; Aurora-DentalResident brings automation and intelligence to what was an immensely time-consuming, error-prone manual process..

Structured Years (D1 & D2)

In the first two years, dental training is largely structured: students move through lecture series, labs, and section-based experiences. Aurora-DentalResident supports hierarchical scheduling of sections and sub-sections. This ensures that small groups (atomic sub-sections) are never double-booked with their parent sections and that every student in the same group receives an equivalent educational experience. The system also enforces room constraints, so proper facilities are assigned, avoiding bottlenecks and resource clashes.

Clinical Years (D3 & D4): Layering Complexity

By the third and fourth years, student scheduling becomes more complex as clinical assignments overlay didactic courses. At this stage, Aurora-DentalResident transitions to per-student scheduling, which ensures every individual gets the proper mix of coursework and clinical experience.

When overlaps arise between clinics and classes, the system employs preemption logic. This capability encodes which activities are allowed to override others and which must yield, distinguishing between acceptable, tolerable, and unacceptable conflicts. The outcome is a carefully balanced schedule that honors requirements without creating chaos for students or faculty.

Output, Visualization & Usability

Aurora-DentalResident also emphasizes clarity in how schedules are communicated. The system generates:

• Course-level schedules 
• Student-level schedules and rosters 
• Clinic availability views 

A standout feature is the Daily Plot interface — a calendar-style visualization that can be filtered by course, student, room, or academic year. This gives administrators, faculty, and students an easy way to spot conflicts or review workload distribution.

Transforming Dental Education Scheduling

By deploying Aurora-DentalResident, NYU Dentistry gains more than a scheduling tool — it gains a robust system capable of handling one of the most complex academic and clinical scheduling problems in higher education. The software reduces administrative burden, minimizes conflicts, and provides fair, transparent scheduling to students and faculty alike.

Aurora-DentalResident allows NYU to move beyond manual firefighting, equipping the institution with a flexible, scalable solution that supports its leadership in dental education well into the future.