EDITORIAL

John Jairo Betancur Pérez¹

¹ Graduate Programs Coordinator

Within the framework of education laws (Act 30 of 1992) and the requirements of high-quality education accreditation, Colombia's higher education system has placed research as a priority of its academic work.

Universidad de Antioquia has established that graduate programs must comply with the principles of relevance, research promotion, interdisciplinarity, institutional and inter-institutional integration, insertion into local, national, and international scientific community, and a capacity to respond to critical social needs, in addition to the usual needs of the diverse disciplines and sciences, with quality and relevance.

Therefore, the purpose of graduate programs and clinical specialties is to promote students' active participation in research projects with the intention of producing new knowledge or technological processes, as a requisite to obtain an academic degree.

Understanding and developing explicative models to the object of study of dentistry stems from the research conducted on this field; therefore, the clinical and surgical specialties at the School of Dentistry are intended to prepare professionals who possess theoretical and technological competences so that they can make part of scientific teams in order to offer cutting-edge clinical services, and to train researchers and scientific leaders who can autonomously perform and direct research projects on the oral component of the human health-illness process at the individual and collective levels. All this with an interdisciplinary perspective, promoting both the capacity of continuously construct and re-construct knowledge and the ability to solve problems, process information, build theoretical models, and apply innovative knowledge to new situations. This means formative research as the basic pillar of the teaching-learning process, as well as scientific research as the articulator of knowledge in the curriculum.