Welcome. This site is my ongoing experiment in what happens when a clinically trained dentist refuses to accept that good dentistry has to be exhausting.
Dentistry is hard — it shouldn’t be getting harder. More and more, as insurance companies pull control away from clinicians, practices are built around volume instead of thoughtful care. If you care about doing careful work and actually listening to patients, you pay for it in time, energy, and burnout. I have lived that tension for years. I’m a better doctor for refusing to rush, but it has also made me one very tired human.
I trained as a dental surgeon at the University of Michigan and quickly fell in love with imaging, systems thinking, and the math behind how everything works. After the first few rewarding years in practice, I started noticing something I couldn’t ignore: today’s dental tech is incredible, but the way offices organize around it is often inefficient and fragile. Patients still experience dentistry as mystery and fear, while clinicians carry the burnout.
My work lives in that gap.
Through DentalDNA and Molar Town, I’m exploring how better software, robotics, and smarter systems design can make high-quality care less exhausting for everyone — patients and providers alike.
A Systems Thinker at Heart
I’ve always been that science-and-math kid — the one who hoarded notebooks full of frantic sketches, screenshots, and a lovely mess of unsorted Google Docs. Dentistry gave me the ultimate real-world puzzle: data, imaging, hardware, software, and anxious humans all tangled together.
It became clear that the next era of care needs to be digital-first, patient-centered, and radically explainable. This path led me to build AI-native tools that treat people as owners of their own data, not just data points. That philosophy shows up in DentalDNA, Molar Town, and the wider Molar Town Universe — where clinical rigor, product design, and playful storytelling collide.
I’m not just about teeth, robots, hardware, and software. I’m a science-first thinker and a connector at heart. When I’m not in “build mode,” you’ll usually find me deep in YouTube lectures or fascinating interviews with scientists I admire. Staying current with breakthroughs genuinely makes me outrageously happy.
I also have a very playful side. Friends know my brain is never far from turning real life into a cartoon, a funny song, or both. Humor helps me make sense of the world, and I dream of one day making a comedy album. I love creating personalized songs for people, and AI tools let me bring those ideas to life in vivid, creative ways. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A couple favorites: my original AI song “3 Apps Open” about the fun (and chaos) of running multiple AI models at once, and “Chess Night at Our House,” which captures the noble but hilarious attempt to have a serious family chess game. These are part of the larger mix of dentistry, robotics, technology, and everyday life that I share on my YouTube channel.
“3 Apps Open (ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini)” — original AI song
Some of the people who’ve shaped my thinking the most include Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, Stephen Wolfram, Andrej Karpathy, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Yann LeCun, Jeff Bezos, Alan Turing, and Marie Curie. Their work keeps my curiosity sharp and my standards high. At my core, I’m driven by a deep respect for humanity and the joy of lifelong learning. That mindset shapes how I approach dentistry, technology, and building a kinder, clearer future for patients.
“Where’s my charger?” Comedy AI Punk Rock song. I can poke fun at myself too. :)
A Living Lab Notebook
This website is my public lab notebook for AI-native dentistry — a place to share prototypes, ideas, and experiments in plain language. It’s also an open invitation to anyone who cares about better tools for oral health.
< dianamcquirter.com > is the hub tying IT ALL together.
If you’re into AI, robotics, product design, or reimagining healthcare with more clarity and less trauma, I hope you’ll explore what I’m building.
This isn’t a finished brand. It’s a living, slightly chaotic, very honest snapshot of one humanist technologist trying to help people have a clearer, kinder relationship with their own biology – starting with their teeth.
