In Osan, South Korea, at the U.S. Air Force Base just 48 miles from the Demilitarized Zone, service members are ready to respond to conflict at a moment’s notice. And stationed with them is Dr. Jackie Lieberman, a general dentist and part of the 51st Medical Group’s triage team.
“I’m in a very, very unique position here,” she says. “The phrase you hear is ‘ready to fight tonight.’ So day to day we do dentistry, and then a couple of days a month we totally don’t do dentistry. We just focus on our training as combat medics, essentially acting as a crash team to assess and sort casualties and provide life-saving measures. We work right alongside our counterparts in the South Korean Air Force.”
“It’s super fast paced and collaborative,” she continues. “And it’s all grounded in our mission to be ready for whatever comes our way to support South Korea.”
Not facing conflict every day but in what’s known as an operational setting, Lieberman has to meet incredibly high standards of care. “We treat pilots who need to be ready to fly immediately,” she says. “Any dental issue can quickly ground them. So what we do directly impacts mission, readiness, and national security. There’s absolutely no room for shortcuts. Whether I’m doing emergency treatment or diagnosing early disease, we need to avoid downstream complications. I would say my commitment to a standard of excellence definitely started with my mentors at Temple Dental.”
To illustrate the point, she notes, “Dr. Nicholas Pizarro and several other exceptional doctors urged me to slow down and really perfect the craft. They stressed that the goal wasn’t to see a certain number of patients or get a box checked off for graduation, but to create long-lasting, high-quality restorations. That has carried directly into my work here.”
Two choices
Home now and stationed until the summer of 2027 at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, Lieberman had a choice two years ago. When she graduated from Temple Dental thanks to the Health Professions Scholarship Program, she knew her immediate future would be dental service in the Air Force. But that could have been stateside at New Jersey’s Maguire Air Force Base. Instead, she raised her hand to volunteer for a more challenging assignment in South Korea. “I knew it would be an opportunity to do something really special outside of my comfort zone,” she explains
As Lieberman thinks about starting a new assignment in Florida, she leaves behind one accomplishment of which she’s especially proud. Partnering with the American Red Cross, she and her commander relaunched the Dental Assistant Training Program within her 51st Dental Flight. After Covid, the program never got rebooted, so Lieberman rebuilt the outdated curriculum and figured out the logistics of working with the Defense Health Agency.
The result has created an opportunity for American spouses to do something that normalizes each day: learning new skills and challenging themselves. The result also has meant a career path for participants through more than 80 hours of curriculum and 600 hours of clinical instruction, all completely free of charge. “It’s super rewarding,” she says, “because it’s a very hard tour here, especially for spouses.”
And the success? One graduate of the program is a Korean American with a fashion degree who tried something new—and now is considering pushing herself beyond dental assistant care when she and her husband return to the States. “We’re encouraging her to do something even greater, whether it be hygiene or dental school,” says Lieberman.
Often taking on leadership roles, Lieberman notes that her Temple Dental experiences as student body president, vice president and president of her class, and alumni relations chair for ASDA have impacted her heavily. “I had amazing Temple faculty mentors who showed me how powerful it is to lead with compassion, and I tried to pass that on by fostering a culture of community where we leaned on each other, making sure no one felt left behind. I’ve carried that with me ever since. And that’s how I connect with my younger airmen today.”
She adds: “Temple Dental really gave me so much, and leaving was bittersweet. It just feels like home to me.”
