Dental Leaders Podcast

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Jameel Gardee joins Payman to reflect on more than three decades in dentistry, from qualifying in Glasgow to undertaking advanced restorative training at Boston University and building a private practice centred on digital dentistry. He looks back on the people and experiences that shaped his career, why American dentistry changed his outlook, and how his approach to restorative treatment has evol...

Dental Leaders goes live from Dentown for a special compilation episode bringing together seven voices from across dentistry, design, technology, entrepreneurship and beyond. Across a series of conversations with Payman, Galip Gürel explores the move from pioneering veneer techniques to developing robotic tooth preparation, and why precision matters more than speed. Nazariy Mykhaylyuk reflects on...

Kathryn Bell was seventeen, six months into a school exchange trip to Kentucky, when a minor car crash jolted loose a brain tumour nobody knew was there. She joins Payman as a general dentist at Coliseum Dental in Chippenham and the group's key opinion leader for facial aesthetics, having spent over two decades qualified after a start to adult life that involved an emergency craniotomy, a coma, me...

Dipali Dalia wanted to be a barrister at fourteen, became a periodontist instead, and then went back and trained as a barrister anyway, in her forties, while still practising three days a week. She joins Payman as a specialist periodontist at Emsworth Specialist Practice near Portsmouth, having qualified as a dentist, specialised in periodontics at Guy's, and then, nearly two decades into a succes...

Bizhan Shokouhi didn't set out to be an oral surgeon, or even to specialise at all. He joins Payman as a specialist oral surgeon and implantologist working across private practice and Guy's Hospital, and teaching on the Bristol MSc in Implants, having spent his first year qualified convinced he'd end up a restorative dentist. He talks openly about the one thing he tells every trainee before they t...

Anita Pradan pulled her car onto the hard shoulder of the motorway one day, cried, took her laptop out of the boot, and typed her resignation. She joins Payman as founder of Phoenix Dental Academy, having spent years running herself into the ground managing someone else's education business before deciding to build her own. She talks openly about the exam that took her five years longer than expec...

Ben Barter has never drilled a tooth in his life, but he's spent more time in dental events than most dentists. He joins Payman as co-founder of Dental Assembly, the latest venture in a career built entirely on getting corporates and suppliers into the same room, first at Open Rooms, then Dental Forum, and now running his own show. In between, there's a properly strange detour: a price comparison...

Bashar Alturk has represented two countries at trampolining — Great Britain, then Jordan — and ruptured both his knees doing it, a year apart, once right before finals. He's also a final-year dental student at Leeds who bought his own phantom head and drill and set them up in his student room because the university wouldn't give him enough practice time. His ADHD diagnosis came late on pur...

Afzal Haque joins Payman as a specialist endodontist and owner of Stretford Road Dental Practice, along with its referral clinic M41 Indo, in South Manchester, having spent ten years as a general dentist before making the switch. He talks candidly about hating endodontics as a young dentist, the wife who talked him into rotary instrumentation and then, years later, into selling their house to fund...

Patrycja Galonzka joins Payman as business manager at Aspire Smiles in Warwick, having worked her way up from trainee dental nurse to the top of the practice after moving to the UK from Poland at nineteen. She talks candidly about the loss that pushed her to stay in the UK rather than go home, and how years spent as a barista and waitress taught her more about handling people than any qualificatio...

Agne Malisauskiene joins Payman as the clinical lead at the Baltic Academy of Aesthetic Dentistry and one of the world's best-known minimally invasive composite teachers, having trained thousands of dentists from her purpose-built facility in Vilnius. She talks candidly about swapping punishing NHS-style hours in Lithuania for a much gentler introduction to UK private dentistry, and how a year...

Shyun Patel joins Payman as a final-year dental student at Liverpool, best known for founding BDSA, the biggest undergraduate dental conference the UK has seen, and for buying his own practice before he's even qualified. He talks candidly about losing the Dental Society presidency election, the autoimmune diagnosis that reshaped how he thinks about time, and the fridge-flipping side hustle tha...

Two CareStack men, one origin story that starts in a Covid ward. Adrian Dray talks Payman through the lead-management deal that nearly bankrupted him, and how that near-miss set him up to bring an American cloud practice management system into a UK market that, by his own admission, "really dislikes change." Kautham Haran, the ops brain to Adrian's front-of-house energy, explains how...

Neil Sikka joins Payman to reflect on a career that has moved from single-surgery NHS dentistry in Bethnal Green to building a ten-practice London group, selling to Bupa, and now helping shape clinical strategy across one of the UK’s biggest dental organisations. He talks candidly about the Barbican Dental Care years, why he chose cultural fit over the highest offer when selling, and why he still...

Recorded live at Bupa Dental Health Is Live, this Dental Leaders episode sees Payman joined by Andrew Bower from Philips Oral Healthcare for a sharp look at dentistry in 2040. The conversation moves from AI, robotics and connected toothbrushes to the bigger question of how oral health can become part of everyday whole-body care. Andrew explores Philips’ long-term view on prevention, consumer behav...

Ian Dunn didn't set out to become a periodontist. A chance encounter with a stranger in a hospital corridor, a course he took on a whim, and the absence of anyone else doing the job in Liverpool — that's how a specialism was born. In this episode, Payman sits down with Ian to trace a career shaped as much by happy accidents as by hard graft; from a comprehensive school kid who retook his A...

From pizza shop to Maxfax theatre — Sina Gilannejad's route into dentistry is anything but straightforward. Born in Northern Ireland to Iranian parents, Sina brings a rare blend of warmth, self-awareness, and hard-won clinical confidence to this conversation.  He opens up about the anxiety that drove him towards DCT, the perfectionism that almost derailed him, and how a stint in maxillofacial...

Meghan Chard is many things at once — principal dentist, practice owner, mum of three, and quietly passionate evangelist for childhood airway health.  In this episode, she sits down with Payman for a wide-ranging conversation that takes in meeting her husband Simon at dental school, buying his family's Leicestershire practice a month before their first child arrived, and the very particular ch...

What happens when a mechanical engineer spends a decade fixing factories, then walks away from it all to start dental school at 34? Henry Totterdell joins Payman to tell that story.  He talks about the years spent solving problems on aircraft carriers and chemotherapy production lines, the slow-burning itch to do something with his hands, and why he finally took the plunge.  Along the way they get...

Ali Al-Hassan is the walking embodiment of work hard, play hard — a young dentist who's gone from associate to super associate, practice co-owner and globe-trotter, all while building a following that brings patients straight to his chair.  In this episode, he and Payman get into what really separates an ordinary associate from a "super" one: bringing in your own patients, owning your fees, and tr...

Ashley King and Sophie Lovett run the international side of Pearl, the AI company that reads dental radiographs — and they turn up as a self-confessed package deal.  The chat starts with what the tech actually does (a second opinion for clinicians, and a way to help patients finally see what's going on in their own mouths), but it doesn't stay there for long. Payman, Ashley and Sophie get...

Professor Tara Renton OBE brings four generations of dental history — and a career built on curiosity rather than ambition — to her conversation with Payman.  From navigating undiagnosed dyslexia and a father who begged her not to follow him into dentistry, to becoming the first female chair of oral surgery at King's College London, her story is one of serendipity, resilience, and an almost ob...

Mike Gray's path to dentistry was anything but straightforward — and that's precisely what makes this conversation so compelling.  A former semi-professional mountain biker who raced the World Series across three disciplines, a musician who once had the head of Universal Publishing sitting in his living room in rural Wales, and a dentist who spent years doing everything he could to avoid d...

Rawa Jawad Quinn is a dentist-turned-tech founder whose restless energy and refusal to be underestimated have shaped every chapter of her career. In this episode, she tells Payman about growing up in Chelsea after her Iraqi family fled Kuwait with nothing, studying in Liverpool, and working across 16 dental practices before channelling her frustrations into Medicube — a consent and patient communi...