Recognition adds to a decorated career that has moved from the clinic to the classroom to health technology
NEW YORK, N.Y. — When Dr. Ekta Pandya founded Raident AI in 2025, she brought to it a résumé few dentists can claim: a decade of clinical practice, a faculty role at NYU Continuing Dental Education, editorial board seats on few journals, and a place on Incisal Edge magazine’s “40 Under 40: America’s Best Young Dentists” list. Last month, she added another credential to that list, a Fellowship in the Pierre Fauchard Academy, the international honor society that inducts dentists by invitation for outstanding achievement and service to the profession.
Dr. Pandya has practiced at Ariel Dental in New Paltz since 2022, where her work spans Invisalign, full-mouth rehabilitation, crowns, root canal therapy, and pediatric care. She has received the America’s Best Dentist Award from the National Consumer Research Council three years running, and her commitment to access has been steady throughout: she has volunteered with Give Kids a Smile and Give Back a Smile since 2017 and with Dentistry from the Heart, and earlier in her career in India organized dental camps and oral health outreach in underserved communities.
It was that depth of clinical experience, rather than a background in technology, that led her to Raident AI. At NYU Continuing Dental Education, where she serves as Clinical Associate and Faculty mentoring general dentists in full-mouth rehabilitation, and in her own practice, she kept encountering the same problem: two capable clinicians can look at the same case and come away with different treatment plans. Much of her published writing, in Dental Economics and on DrBicuspid.com, has examined that variability and how AI-assisted tools might narrow it without sidelining clinical judgment.
Raident AI is her answer to that question. The platform gives dentists AI-assisted support for diagnosis and treatment planning across case types including restorative work and full-mouth rehabilitation, and it continues to gain traction among general practices. What distinguishes it, in her view, is that it was designed by someone who still spends her days chairside, applying the same judgment the software is built to support.
Her standing in the profession extends beyond the clinic as well. She holds editorial board positions with multiple dental journals and is active in the New York State Dental Association’s Ninth District, where she co-chairs the New Dentist Committee.
The Pierre Fauchard Academy Fellowship caps a career that has earned recognition at every stage, from the operatory to the lecture hall to the editorial page. For Dr. Pandya, it arrives at a moment when that accumulated experience is being channeled into something new: building the tools she believes will help dentists everywhere practice with greater consistency and confidence.
