Ann H. Kristovich, DDS

Ann H. Kristovich, DDS

Dr. Ann Kristovich was born in California and moved with her family to Dallas, Texas in 1962. There she attended junior high and high school. She attended the University of Texas in Austin and received a BA in Biology in 1973. In 1974 she was accepted to Baylor Dental School and was one of only four women in her class of 130 students. Following graduation in 1977, Dr. Kristovich completed a General Practice Residency program at the Dallas VA hospital.

Dr. Kristovich was the first female resident to complete the Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Residency at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Dallas, Southwestern Medical School, and Parkland Memorial Hospital. Dr. Ann Kristovich has been practicing Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery in Austin, Texas since 1981.

She has had a very strong commitment to giving back to her community and has traveled to third world countries to participate with medical and dental teams providing care for people who otherwise had none. In this capacity she has traveled to Tegucigalpa, Honduras to treat cleft lips deformities and to Manaus, Brazil and Charity, Guyana as a part of a dental surgical team. She describes that these experiences have been the richest of her professional life.

In 1987, Dr. Kristovich took her first instruction in scuba diving and it would change her life. Subsequently she became involved in cave exploration and cave diving. She is the co-leader of the Proyecto de Buceo Espeleologico Mexico y America Central, an elite team of adventurers and explorers dedicated to the study and discovery of the underground. In 1993 she dove to 554 feet and set a woman’s World Record for diving deep on mixed gas in a cave. She set another record the following year when she dove to 370 feet on air. She has traveled around the world speaking to audiences about her cave diving explorations. As the medical officer for her team, she has been the innovator of methods of managing decompression sickness in remote sites and has widely published her experiences in the United States, Europe and Australia. A prolific photographer, photos of her explorations have been printed in dive magazines from the USA, to Italy, France, England, Poland, and Russia.

At home, Dr. Kristovich is an avid cook and gardener and enjoys traveling.

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