Joel has long been fascinated with dentistry. His project, BAD BREATH: Breathe and Diagnose; Be Ready, Eager, & Aware To Help, identifies bad breath as an amazing tool that acts like a smoke detector. Joel’s mission is to teach people how to recognize bad breath smells that can signal oral manifestations and even serious medical diseases. By paying close attention to how your breath smells, you may diagnose potential problems quick enough to possibly save your life.
Joel was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, on March 7, 1996 to Joel and Gina Bullard. Although active in basketball and baseball throughout middle school and high school, Joel’s career aspirations initially were to become a pastor. When he entered high school, his goal changed. Joel decided that he wanted to become a doctor to substantially improve health outcomes for low-income communities, and to be a positive role model for underrepresented minorities.
At age 18, Joel decided that dentistry and entrepreneurship were his life ambitions. With the help of mentors and older classmates, he found his passion in the specialty of oral and maxillofacial surgery. Throughout his undergraduate education, Joel worked as an anatomy and physiology lab assistant and also shadowed dentists every summer, including a general dentist, an orthodontist, and finally an oral and maxillofacial surgeon. He witnessed first hand, incredible surgeries and sat in on consultations. Joel watched exciting extractions, repairing facial trauma injuries, correcting birth defects within the oral cavity, and giving anesthesia.
In 2018, Joel spoke at TEDxMeritAcademy in Santa Cruz, California. He had the opportunity to present his ideas and vision on how oral manifestations awareness can save people’s lives. Joel first became aware of breath odors when a girl rejected his close friend due to his bad breath. By assessing these oral health conditions and sharing how specific bad breath smells can be used to detect life-threatening diseases, you can save a life before it spreads throughout a person’s body. Joel explained how essential your breath can be in saving your life. All breath smells, whether fishy, fruity, cheesy, acidic, or musty, can be associated with diseases.
Passionate about pursuing a career in oral & maxillofacial surgery and entrepreneurship, Joel hopes that he can inspire people across the United States and globally impact people around the world to recognize how bad breath can detect, spread, and link diseases. He has witnessed first hand how having bad breath can negatively affect an adolescent’s and young adult’s social and personal life. He plans to publicly bring awareness to this issue to help people of all ages, so that they may have healthy and happy lives.