Dr Mariam Khokhar

Dr Mariam A. Khokhar is a dental public health researcher and patient involvement specialist with over a decade of experience bridging the gap between research and the people it's meant to serve. She holds a PhD from the University of Sheffield and has worked across some of the most complex global health challenges -from tobacco control in South Asia to oral cancer in Pakistan and oral health in motor neurone disease. Along the way she's coordinated multi-country clinical trials, led Cochrane systematic reviews, and published in high-impact journals.

Mariam joined the Centre for Primary Care in September 2025 and is now managing the ACED PPIE panel across the UK, USA, and Germany- making sure that patients, communities, and the public have a genuine voice in how early cancer detection research is shaped and delivered. Early cancer detection and primary care are relatively new territories for her, but she's bringing fresh eyes, a wealth of cross-disciplinary experience, and a genuine passion for making research meaningful to the people it affects most.

When she's not wrangling international PPIE panels, Mariam can be found behind a camera lens -she has a keen eye for photography and a love of capturing the world in ways others might overlook. She also has a bit of a thing for quantum physics, which, when you think about it, isn't so different from public involvement research -both involve a lot of uncertainty, a great deal of observation, and the unsettling suspicion that the act of looking changes everything.