Marguerite is a University of Queensland graduate, but left Queensland to pursue a career in the Royal Australian Air Force, serving in Melbourne, Newcastle and Malaysia.

Deciding to ‘spread her wings’ further, she then transferred to the Royal Air Force (RAF), where she spent the next 21 years serving in various clinical, operational and command posts throughout Europe and the Middle East.

It was in the UK Armed Forces that she first developed an interest in sedation and anxiety management and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Conscious Sedation at King’s College London.

This equipped her to set up a referral service treating military patients under IV sedation. She also developed a course in sedation and anxiety management for newly qualified military dentists whilst also training dentists and dental nurses in nitrous oxide inhalation sedation.

An examiner with the National Examining Board for Dental Nurses for over 10 years, she has also lectured at annual conferences of the Society for the Advancement of Anaesthesia in Dentistry (SAAD), the UK peak body for dental sedation.

On her retirement from the RAF and her return to her ‘home town’ of Brisbane, Marguerite joined Queensland Health, supervising undergraduate students in oral surgery at the UQ Oral Health Centre, Herston.

Having attained AHPRA endorsement for Conscious Sedation, she set up an IV sedation clinic at Herston, the only such service for public dental patients in the State. She has continued to provide this service, alongside various management roles in the corporate and public sectors.

She is currently an Associate Professor in Clinical Dentistry at James Cook University and is on the Australian Dental Council Register of Assessors.