1207 Volvo Pkwy Suite 200 Chesapeake, VA 23320

Our Story Cranham Culp Digital Dental

Dr. John Cranham and Lee Culp (C.D.T.) have been active educators for over 30 years. Combined, they have presented over 1200 days (9600 hours) of continuing education all over the world. John and Lee met at a Pete Dawson Course in the late 1980s and began their careers with the foundational principles of occlusion, esthetics, biologic health, and tooth-by-tooth structural integrity. Their primary focus has been helping patients reach optimum oral health and helping other dental professionals reach their goals, ultimately creating the best version of themselves. 

Lee has spent his career working at the bench in a laboratory setting, along with multiple dental manufacturers. He has received numerous awards and accolades for his clinical work, research, published articles, and vision. His focus has been on doing the highest quality laboratory work possible while advancing dental laboratory products, procedures, technologies, and processes in a way that few other people have. Lee has been involved with digital dentistry from the very beginning, and he, working closely with his amazing team at Sculpture Studios, is responsible for the workflows that CCDD is teaching. 

John started his career with Dr. Pete Dawson and The Pankey Institute, finishing both continuums within his first four years of practice. In the early ’90s, he immersed himself in the emerging field of cosmetic dentistry and took lectures and hands-on courses from Rosenthal, Nash, Dickerson, Spear, and Kois. By mid-1995, he blended the principles of cosmetic dentistry and occlusion and started teaching a course called “the Cosmetic Occlusal Connection”. This evolved to the creation of Cranham Dental Seminars (CDS) that provided both hands-on and lecture experiences. CDS merged with The Dawson Academy (DA) in 2007. Dr. Cranham became a 1/3 partner of the DA and its acting Clinical Director. He held that position until he stepped down in 2020 to focus on other things, including the completion of his transition to digital. 

Dr. Cranham and Culp Digital Dentistry

Inspired by the encouragement from Dr. Dawson in 2005, John began to focus on Digital Dentistry. While the integration of scanning and CBCT technologies was fairly straightforward, the software was lacking for a clinical team to do the things on a virtual articulator in the same way they could on a traditional analog Instrument. In 2017 John began hearing that Lee had created workflows inside of existing software and had great success doing trial equilibration, diagnostic waxing, orthotic fabrication, and provisional shell fabrication, along with many other things. This spurred a phone call. 

John spent a solid year learning from Lee and doing a deep dive into the 3Shape Lab Premier software, learning his workflows. The distance between Apex, NC, and Chesapeake, VA, made his implementation extremely difficult. While convinced that these protocols exceeded everything he had ever done in the analog world, he began thinking about a better way to help dentists transition to these no-compromise digital workflows. 

In December 2020, Dr. Cranham created Cranham Clinical Coaching. His goal was to do a proof of concept with 25 doctors. He used the “Teachable” web-based training portal, combined with one-on-one coaching experiences through Teamviewer and Zoom. The goal was to create a new way of learning and implementation for Doctors/Teams. For the price of one 2.5-day hands-on course, one of the major CE centers in the US, a Doctor could have a one-year relationship with Dr. Cranham and the others in the community and learn. The focus was both on learning the “buttonology” of the software, implementation of the workflows into general practice, as well as the opportunity to treatment plan complex cases at an extremely high level. 

By mid-2021, Dr. Cranham was certain this new way of learning and training doctors/teams was exceeding both his expectations as well as those of his clients. The clients were implementing, saving time, gaining confidence to do more complex treatments, and experiencing significant ROI. With that information, he reached out to Lee and ask him if he would join him in this new venture under the umbrella of Cranham Culp Digital Dental. On January 1, 2022, Cranham Culp Digital Dental was born. John and Lee have been working diligently on that since. This site is dedicated to illustrating the exciting new way for doctors, lab technicians, and dental teams can learn, implement, and experience significant growth, while traveling far less and spending way less money.