There’s a new smile around the Crosstown Dental office.
Dr. Jessica Jordan joins Dr. Daniel Bird and his staff as a second full-time dentist at both their Crosstown Concourse location and their soon-to-open Highland Avenue location. In just under three years, Crosstown Dental has grown from a brand new practice with no patients to serving 4,000 patients, which has led to the need for a second location on Highland.
“Dr. Jordan brings a lot to Crosstown Dental Group,” says Dr. Bird, who opened his high-tech dental practice in Crosstown Concourse in 2017. “She is young, female, and African-American, so she brings a new perspective and attitude to the practice. She is very detail-oriented and extremely talented with cosmetic procedures. She has a great eye and can relate to the fears of many of our apprehensive patients. She brings a very calming personality and is very pragmatic in how she approaches dentistry.”
A native of White House, Tennessee, Jordan moved to Memphis for grad school at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC). After graduating, she met Dr. Bird while working at a dental practice in West Memphis, Arkansas.
“[Before opening Crosstown Dental], Dr. Bird sold that practice [in West Memphis] to the corporation that hired me. When I came in as a new graduate, he trained me,” Jordan says. “He eventually left that company and came to Crosstown, and now here I am.”
Long before meeting Bird, Jordan co-founded the first dental pre-professional club at Western Kentucky University (WKU), where she went for undergrad. WKU’s Pre-Dental Society is still active today.
“The university had a club for doctors, like a medical professionals club, so everybody who wanted to pursue dentistry just joined that club,” Jordan says. “But then I created a separate club, so we could bring in speakers who would speak on topics related to the dental industry.”
In her second year of dental school at UTHSC, Jordan traveled to Ecuador on a mission trip with the Baptist Campus Ministry. There, she was able to provide dental care to an underserved community.
“When your standard of living is lower, you may not put as much focus on brushing your teeth and hygiene,” Jordan says. “For many of those people, we were the only dentists they’d ever see in their lifetimes. This was their chance to get bombed-out teeth taken out. They would tell us how grateful they were, and you could see their smile.”
The following year, Jordan participated in a national dentistry program on the Native American reservation for the Swinomish Tribe of Seattle, Washington.
“The reservation I was on had a dental clinic, so they’d always had access to dentistry. But some people chose not to pay to save bad teeth and instead wanted extractions and dentures,” Jordan says.
After graduating from UTHSC in 2015, Jordan continued to live in Memphis. She began working at the dental practice in West Memphis with Bird, and then later, she went to work for a dental practice in Brinkley, Arkansas. While working in Arkansas, she’d make the daily commute from her home in Memphis.
But now that she’s working in Memphis, Jordan is glad for the extra time she can spend with her husband Marcus at their Midtown home.
Regular patients at Crosstown Dental may recognize Jordan. Before she was hired on at Crosstown Dental, Jordan would often fill in for Bird when he was on vacation.
“I knew the office and the team and the capability of this office. The technology is just light-years beyond that of any other dental practice, and I love that,” Jordan says. “It’s a luxury to have your own lab right here. That really sets us apart.”
Once the Highland Avenue location opens later this summer, Bird and Jordan will take turns working at each office for a week at a time. The hygienists and assistants will also rotate offices.
“We really wanted both offices to feel like one team,” she says. “We don’t want the Highland office to feel like it’s competing with Crosstown.”
