Building A Legacy through Love & Leadership

By Judson Meade; Photos by Douglas Levere

Editor's note: This story originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of UB Dentist magazine.

Assigned seats alphabetically in the preclinical lab, first-year student Bob Lalor, DDS ’00, sat directly behind his future wife, Mary John, DDS ’00.

They started dating the next year. They were a couple by their fourth year, but decided not to apply for a “couples” residency match in order to preserve their educational independence. Separately, they both matched at Nassau Memorial Hospital on Long Island.

Bob finished his residency and moved home to the Binghamton, NY, area to join his father’s practice. After staying at Nassau Memorial for a second year as chief resident, Mary joined Bob in Binghamton, they married, and she started practicing across town.

 A little more than 20 years later, they’re still practicing—but now have more than 250 employees.

 And they share their success. The couple made a gift to the UBSDM to create the Lalor Family Conference Room in the UBSDM’s preclinical suite. Starting next year, through yet more generosity, a Lalor Family Scholarship will benefit students from the Broome County, NY, region—the home of Lalor Family Dental.

 In recognition of their accomplishments, Mary John and Bob Lalor have been named 2025 UB Distinguished Alumni.

 “Mary and Bob embody the best of UB,” said Marcelo Araujo, DDS, MS ’99, PhD ’03, dean of the dental school. “They are superb clinicians, visionary leaders and compassionate mentors who have never forgotten where they came from. Their generosity uplifts our school and inspires future generations of dentists.”

 Lalor Family Dental, the multi-specialty group practice they’ve built, with three primary and two satellite practice sites in the Binghamton area and a newer location in Syracuse, looks like the vision in a textbook business plan.

Actually, it started as the Lalors’ reaction to a natural disaster.

In 2010, Mary and Bob borrowed to purchase Bob’s father’s practice and expand the practice site. Then, in September 2011, Tropical Storm Lee flooded the Binghamton area, including Vestal, NY, where the practice was located.

“I realized I was responsible for the whole nut,” Bob remembers. The practice could easily have washed away, leaving nothing but the debt. He started looking for a second site well above the waterline. “That was the genesis of our second office,” Bob says. “Our ‘vision’ was safety.”

 Mary was the dentist at the second site, seeing patients a few days a week. They added a dentist and went to five days a week. After a year, the office was paying for itself. So they said, “Hey, let’s try it again.” Every few years since, they’ve grown.

 “When you’re in it, you don’t necessarily appreciate where you are,” says Mary. “But when I step back, I have to say, yes, we’ve been successful.”

 Bob and Mary play distinct roles on their executive team of two. “I’m the ‘dentist’ dentist and the business and finance guy,“ Bob says. “Mary is the communicator, the relationship person.” As the group was growing, Mary occasionally filled in for Bob at staff meetings and eventually took over the role. “For the sake of my ego, I guess, no one said to me, ‘Mary’s better at this,’” Bob says. “But she is.”

 They both continue to see patients. When they opened Syracuse Family Dental in 2023, after converting a building that had once been an Outback Steakhouse, they were its first dentists, driving an hour and a half each way.

 Their business may not have had a textbook origin, but it thrives on classic business principles. First, as the Lalor Family Dental mission says, “to be the best in town.”

 Long before Lalor Family Dental was more than Bob and his father, Bob had set out to be the best version of who he could be as a clinician. 

He earned his Academy of General Dentistry Mastership, absorbing more than 1,000 hours of  CE courses. As a young business owner, he sought out conferences, consultants, readings— anything to help himself get it right.

On the soft skills side of the business, Mary says that if they focus on building the best possible team, they don’t have to worry about the patient experience because they can rely on the team they’ve built to deliver that.

As for growth, according to Mary, they don’t see a limit on the horizon. “We grow to the ability we can handle things,” Bob Lalor says. “We won’t put the brakes on for any reason other than what the business demands.”

Lalor Family Dental’s biggest challenge is recruiting dentists to keep up with growth. They have a few dentists who commute from the New York City area a few days a week. They’ve hired dentists into the group who are stepping back from running their own practices. They make themselves an attractive place to practice, advertising that their “doctors only do what only doctors can do.” They actively recruit with visits to dental schools.

 And they grow their own recruits. Lalor Family Dental has, so far, sent 35 employees on to dental school, a matter of great pride to Bob and Mary. They are a large workplace where graduates of SUNY Binghamton, Mary’s undergraduate alma mater, and other colleges in the area can test their interest in dentistry.

 Bob says they’re happy to hire motivated young people interested in dentistry who they know will probably be gone in a year. Even though the churn has its costs, “I’d rather have a really good person for a year than someone with less to offer us for longer.”

 Two of their success stories, Justin Sbarra, DDS ’20, and LJ Camacho, DDS ’21, practice with the group today.

 Sbarra, a SUNY Oswego graduate, didn’t get into dental school on his first try straight from college. He went to work at Lalor and, a year later, was accepted at four schools, including UB.

Bob admits to maybe a nudge toward UB. “I don’t really have to sell UB,” he says, “it sells itself.” Sbarra did his residency at St. Joseph’s Health Hospital in Syracuse, with Mary as his supervisor.

 “You know they always have your best interest in mind,” Sbarra says about Mary and Bob.

 Camacho wasn’t sure what career path he wanted when he went to work at Dinosaur Dental, the Lalors’ pediatric dental practice, as a sterilization assistant in 2015. “The rest is history,” he says.

 Six years later, he graduated from UB’s dental school. After a two-year pediatric dentistry residency at the Eastman Institute for Oral Health in Rochester, he’s back at Dinosaur as  Dr. Camacho.

 That provides some of the motivation for the Lalors’ generosity toward the UBSDM. “We’re dentists,” Mary  says, “so it makes sense to give to a place that creates dentists.” She describes her parents as “quietly” generous and that she grew up following that pattern of behavior.

 In 2021, the Lalors accepted a role as UBSDM campaign committee representatives in UB’s successful Boldly Buffalo campaign.

 Bob says he was introduced to the concept of regular philanthropy as a way of life when he was a young dentist. In the past 20 years, as he’s lived that life, his and Mary’s ability to give has grown with their success. But the giving isn’t so automatic that it doesn’t require the effort of choice.

“Even now,” he says, “there is always an excuse not to give, a pending expense for something you really need in the business. I try to live up to how we can do it, rather than how we can avoid it.”

Mary puts their approach this simply: “If we can give, we do.” 

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