Dr. Buist was born April 5, 1956 in Charleston, SC. When he was a child, his family moved to Huntsville, AL with the space program. When Dr. Buist graduated high school from Huntsville High, he went on to receive his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Auburn University in 1978. Thereafter, he received his Doctor of Dental Medicine from the University of Alabama School of Dentistry in 1982. Starting in the 1980s, Dr. Buist devoted himself to implant dentistry and went on to accumulate multiple credentials from dental implant organizations, including the following:

• Diplomate of the American Board of Oral Implantology/Implant Dentistry;
• Fellow of the American Academy of Implant Dentistry; and
• Fellow of the International Congress of Oral Implantology.

In addition to implant dentistry, Dr. Buist has always been a hobbyist engineer and product designer. His fascination with engineering and problem-solving stems from his childhood and his father’s role in early NASA space program. While Dr. Buist was a child, his father was an engineer devoted to the first-stage F-1 engines on the Saturn V rocket. The zeitgeist of Dr. Buist’s childhood in Huntsville, AL was a unique one, where the people around him were selflessly devoted to solving the most impossible problem: How do we put people on the moon? The inspiration he felt during these times followed him into his adulthood and into his career as a dentist.

Dr. Buist’s love for creating things first manifested itself in the form of carpentry. He was fascinated with woodworking and eventually became highly skilled in that art. He later channeled his creative energy into making jewelry and high-end knives. Finally, his hobbies circled back into his profession when he started designing instruments for implant dentistry.

Interestingly, Dr. Buist credits much of his success in implant dentistry to his fascination with carpentry because of the similarity between human bone and wood. This combination of experience in carpentry and implant dentistry inspired many of Dr. Buist’s ideas for novel instrument designs and techniques for manipulating human bone during surgery and implant placement. Dr. Buist began designing instruments years ago, namely for surgical procedures. Around 2017, he decided that his prototypes could not be usefully honed any further. At that point, he began working with his son, Charles Jr., on securing his intellectual property rights and developing a strategy to get his instruments into the hands of other dentists. In 2017, Surgeon’s Hands, LLC was formed. Thereafter, in 2020, Dr. Buist received the patents on his first instruments from the United States Patent Office — the instruments featured on this site.