The Shirley Glasstone Hughes (SGH) Trust Fund was set up in 1991 after Shirley Glasstone Hughes, dentist, researcher and BDA member left her legacy to be used as a memorial fund to provide grants for dental research.

Shirley Glasstone Hughes herself was a very active researcher and her work in embryology and tooth development is regarded as laying the foundations of bioengineering tooth structures in dentistry.

To date, the SGH Trust Fund has sponsored 41 research projects worth a total of £678,223.

In 2004, the SGH Trustees took the decision to evaluate the quality of research output from the Trust spending and assess its relevance to primary dental care practice. The evaluation concluded that although the research sponsored by the fund was scientifically sound, greater effort was required to ensure that all future SGH funded work addressed research themes of direct relevance to primary dental care.

This new on-line forum has been designed to collect the research questions that primary care dental practitioners would like real, definitive answers to. These research themes will dictate the future agenda for research that will be funded by the SGH Trust Fund.