Dr. Jonathan Berkowitz, DMD

Background

Dr. Jonathan Berkowitz grew up in Queens and on Long Island. He earned his Bachelor of Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2007 and his Doctor of Dental Medicine from the University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine in 2012.

After dental school he completed a general practice residency at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Montrose, New York — a hospital-based program that exposes residents to a far broader and more medically complex range of patients than most new dentists encounter.

He then undertook a three-year prosthodontic residency at the University of Michigan and the Detroit Veterans Administration, one of the most respected specialty programs in the country. In his final year he was appointed Chief Resident and served as an instructor at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, teaching the discipline to the residents coming up behind him.

He then spent ten years as the attending prosthodontist at the Northport Veterans Administration Medical Center on Long Island, where he trained many residents of his own — a number of whom have said since how much the training mattered to them.

That decade is worth pausing on. A hospital attending sees the cases that arrive without warning and without an easy answer: patients with complex medical histories, extensive tooth loss, failed previous work, and situations a private practice can choose to decline. Ten years of that, while simultaneously teaching residents how to think through it, is a different kind of experience from ten years of routine restorative dentistry.

He now practices alongside his father, Dr. Steven Berkowitz, on West 86th Street.

What prosthodontic training actually covers

Dental school teaches every dentist to fill teeth, make single crowns, and manage routine care. A prosthodontic residency is three additional years spent almost entirely on what happens when that is not enough.

The core of it is occlusion — the study of how the upper and lower teeth meet, how chewing force is distributed, and what happens to restorations when that distribution is wrong. This is the least visible part of dentistry and the most consequential. A crown that fractures every few years, a bridge that keeps debonding, a set of veneers that chip: these are almost never material failures. They are bite failures.

The rest of the training covers implant surgery and implant restoration, full-arch rehabilitation, removable prosthetics, maxillofacial prosthetics for patients who have lost tissue to cancer or trauma, and dental esthetics as it relates to the whole face rather than to individual teeth.

Placing and restoring under one roof

Most implant treatment in New York is divided between two practices. An oral surgeon or periodontist places the implant, and a general dentist makes the crown that goes on it. Both may do their part competently, and the result can still be poor — because an implant placed without a clear plan for the tooth that will sit on it is a surgical success and a restorative problem.

Dr. Berkowitz does both. The final tooth is designed before the implant is placed, and the implant is positioned to serve that design. If something needs adjusting later, one person is responsible, and there is no question of which office is at fault.