Dr. Plage is a graduate of Wake Forest University and Georgetown University School of Dentistry. After graduation, he joined the U.S. Public Health Service and completed a GPR program in Lexington, Kentucky. He was assigned to the U.S. Coast Guard, where he spent five years as a USCG dental officer, attaining the rank of LCDR and receiving the U.S. Coast Guard Achievement Medal. He has been in private practice in Wilmington since 1985. Bob has served as past president of the Wilmington Dental Society, the North Carolina Dental Society’s Fifth District, and the North Carolina Dental Society. He was awarded the NCDS Meritorious Achievement Award in 2014. He served as a delegate to the ADA for the 16th District for twenty years. While an ADA delegate, he served on the ADA Council on Dental Benefit Programs as Vice-Chair and on the ADA Audit Committee as a representative from the ADA House of Delegates. He is a past caucus chair of the ADA 16th District Delegation. He is a former Carolinas Section Chair and helped initiate, and currently participates in, the ACD Ethics Dilemmas Workshops at both the UNC School of Dentistry and the East Carolina School of Dental Medicine.

He and his wife, Anne, chaired the Wilmington Mission of Mercy program for many years. The first MOM program in Wilmington was the Eagle Scout Project of their son Michael, who is now a dentist and has been a partner in Plage Dentistry since 2016. Michael is married to Nataleigh, also a dentist, and they are new parents of a daughter. The Plages’ daughter, Cait Robertson, and her husband live in Franklin, Tennessee, and have two young boys.