Mary Otto, is a Washington, DC-based journalist who began writing about oral health at the Washington Post, where she covered social issues, including health care and poverty. In 2007, her stories about 12-year-old Deamonte Driver, a Maryland Medicaid child who died from complications of an untreated dental infection, spurred Congressional hearings, a revamping of Maryland's Medicaid dental system, and increased attention to oral health access for poor children nationwide. After leaving the Post in 2008, Otto spent an academic year studying oral health at Harvard as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She now works as an independent journalist and oral health topic leader for the Missouri School of Journalism-based Association of Health Care Journalists. She is the author of Teeth: the Story of Beauty, Inequality and the Struggle for Oral Health in America published by the New Press.