Dental Leaders Podcast

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 evolved. The conversation also explores the pressures facing younger dentists, the value of mentorship and why becoming an excellent clinician takes more than technical ability.Much of the discussion centres on the shift from analogue to digital dentistry. Jameel breaks down the workflows behind modern smile design, from facial scanning and treatment planning to guided preparations, 3D printing and restorative materials. But there's a distinction he keeps coming back to: owning the latest technology means very little if you don't know how to bring it all together.The conversation also takes a more personal turn as Jameel reflects on difficult patients, clinical mistakes and the emotional weight of complaints. With AI and robotics changing the profession, he considers what the next generation of dentists will need to learn and why human connection may become more valuable than ever.Expect honest reflections on clinical excellence, digital workflows, patient trust, innovation, mentorship and the changing relationship between technology and the people delivering care.In This Episode00:00:50 – From Glasgow to Boston00:05:05 – American dentistry and clinical philosophy00:09:05 – Mentorship and younger dentists00:21:25 – Funding further education00:24:35 – Private practice and patient trust00:31:20 – Empowering the dental team00:34:05 – Discovering digital dentistry00:38:00 – Workflows over equipment00:41:25 – The digital first visit00:44:25 – Facially driven treatment planning00:51:30 – Mock-ups and smile design00:53:50 – Guided restorative dentistry00:57:45 – 3D printing and zirconia01:04:25 – Research versus clinical experience01:10:00 – Technology and patient communication01:16:10 – Robotics and the future01:21:40 – Blackbox thinking01:29:15 – Learning and clinical development01:31:20 – Fantasy dinner party01:35:45 – Life outside dentistryAbout Jameel GardeeJameel Gardee is a Glasgow-based dentist and educator known for his work in digital dentistry, aesthetic restorations and smile design. After qualifying from the University of Glasgow in 1995, he undertook advanced restorative and aesthetic training at Boston University.He has since built a career combining private clinical practice with digital education, helping dentists and their teams adopt modern treatment planning and restorative workflows. Through his work with Avant Garde Dentistry, he continues to champion the use of technology to make complex dentistry more predictable and accessible.

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 microscope dentistry, perfectionism and continuing to practise and run businesses in Kyiv during wartime.Millie Morrison discusses finding her place in orthodontics, the responsibility of mentorship and overcoming the feeling that she needed to stay in her original clinical lane. Pouyan Mehdizadeh looks beyond conventional clinic design to the complete patient experience, exploring how architecture, branding, scent, sound, lighting and temperature can shape the way a space feels.Sahil Patel takes the conversation far outside the surgery with the story of climbing Everest, from the six-week commitment and extreme conditions to summit fever and the reality that reaching the top is only halfway home. Victoria Sampson shares the less glamorous reality behind building a fast-growing business, fundraising, clinical dentistry and trying not to burn out.Finally, Dentown founder Mehy Lo Presti joins Payman at the end of the event to reflect on two years of planning, building a world-class speaker line-up and his determination to create a different kind of dental event.Expect robotics, clinical excellence, mentorship, design, Everest, entrepreneurship, burnout and a behind-the-scenes look at the ideas shaping dentistry's next chapter.In This Episode00:00:50 - Galip Gürel00:19:10 - Nazariy Mykhaylyuk00:21:20 - Millie Morrison00:35:10 - Pouyan Mehdizadeh00:49:35 - Sahil Patel01:01:20 - Victoria Sampson01:12:25 - Mehy Lo PrestiAbout the SpeakersGalip Gürel is an internationally renowned aesthetic dentist and educator whose work has helped shape modern veneer dentistry. At Dentown, he discusses his move into dental robotics and the development of technology designed to bring greater precision and automation to tooth preparation.Nazariy Mykhaylyuk is known internationally for microscope-enhanced dentistry and advanced digital workflows. Based in Kyiv, he continues to practise, teach and run his businesses while living through the realities of war in Ukraine.Millie Morrison is a general dentist with a major clinical and educational focus on orthodontics. Alongside treating patients, she mentors other dentists in treatment planning, biomechanics and building confidence in their own clinical decision-making.Pouyan Mehdizadeh is an architect, creative director and experience designer whose work spans healthcare projects internationally. His approach extends beyond interiors to consider every element of how patients experience a healthcare brand and physical space.Sahil Patel is an accomplished cosmetic dentist and mountaineer who recently summited Mount Everest. His conversation explores the preparation, risk, psychology and extraordinary logistics behind taking on the world's highest mountain.Victoria Sampson is a dentist, researcher and entrepreneur known for her work around saliva diagnostics and the oral microbiome. She discusses building her testing business, fundraising, maintaining clinical practice and managing the intense workload that comes with pursuing several ambitions at once.Mehy Lo Presti is the founder of Dentown. After two years of planning, he brought together leading clinicians and thinkers for an event designed to challenge the traditional dental conference format through education, experience and community.

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 Colosseum 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, meningitis and hydrocephalus, largely without her parents in the room.She talks with real clarity about survivor's guilt, about repeating a year at school rather than falling behind her friends, and about the internal motivation that got her through GCSEs with headaches nobody could explain, years before anyone found the tumour causing them. There's a second, quieter story running alongside it too: a burnout so complete she couldn't get out of bed most mornings on the NHS, and the daughter whose birth, entirely by coincidence, pulled her out of it just in time.Kathryn also gets specific about the actual craft of facial aesthetics: polynucleotides, why subtlety beats a dramatic result every time, and the patient with suspected body dysmorphia who brought her own fifty-times magnifying mirror to a review appointment. In This Episode00:00:45 – Introduction00:01:45 – The brain tumour story00:17:40 – Survivor's guilt00:20:25 – Choosing dentistry00:22:45 – Losing time at school00:28:30 – Master's in aesthetic medicine00:31:05 – Social media and dysmorphia00:33:00 – Introducing facial aesthetics00:40:00 – Skin treatments vs injectables00:45:30 – A facial aesthetics mistake00:56:20 – Women in dentistry01:02:50 – A career mistake01:09:55 – Burnout on the NHS01:14:30 – Best lecture: Callum Youngson01:19:35 – Fantasy dinner party About Kathryn BellKathryn Bell is a general dentist at Colosseum Dental in Chippenham and the group's key opinion leader for facial aesthetics across its 80 practices. She holds an MSc in Aesthetic Medicine, researching how social media shapes aesthetic patients' self-perception, and survived a brain haemorrhage and tumour removal at the age of seventeen.

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 successful referral practice, gone back to college to sit alongside twenty-somethings doing a law conversion course.She's honest about why the second career never quite happened. A scholarship from an Inn of Court, a year of criminal law that suited her better than the dry civil procedure rules, county court advocacy work to build experience, and still no pupillage by the time her father died of dementia at the end of a long, hardworking life. That loss changed everything, and Dipali talks with real clarity about the Hindu philosophy she leaned on afterwards, focused on the action rather than the outcome, and about coming back to periodontics with a settledness she didn't have before.Anyone considering the same leap gets something to work with too: referral relationships, the loneliness of the bar versus the immediacy of a dental chair, and Dipali's own conclusion that failure is better read as a redirect than a verdict on your worth. In This Episode00:00:50 – Introduction00:01:56 – Choosing dentistry over law00:14:53 – Maxillofacial training00:17:57 – Deciding to specialise00:24:52 – Becoming a periodontist00:28:12 – Referral relationships00:34:47 – Peri-implantitis management00:46:31 – The itch to become a barrister00:52:17 – Training as a barrister in her 40s01:00:17 – Comparing dentistry and law01:10:27 – Losing her dad01:17:56 – Failure as redirection01:22:20 – A happier periodontist now01:29:23 – Fantasy dinner party01:38:08 – Women in dentistry and law About Dipali DaliaDipali Dalia is a specialist periodontist at Emsworth Specialist Practice near Portsmouth, having trained at Guy's after an early spell in maxillofacial surgery. In her forties, she trained part-time as a barrister, completing a law conversion course and the bar course while continuing to practise periodontics, before returning to dentistry full-time.

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 touch an implant, which has nothing to do with surgery and everything to do with communication, and about a denture case that took twenty-odd visits over eighteen months before he admitted defeat and referred it on. There's a genuinely reflective stretch on ambition too: Bizhan's own answer to whether he'd want his own practice is a flat no, and his reasoning, built around contentment rather than potential, runs against almost everything you'd expect from someone this good at his job.Along the way, there's proper technical detail on soft tissue management, bone grafting, and why the first five minutes of a surgery matter more than anything that happens with a suture. And by the end, Payman more or less names the episode for him: was it worth it? In This Episode00:00:50 – Introduction00:01:35 – A typical working week00:04:20 – Becoming excellent00:09:28 – Work-life balance00:14:36 – Getting into implantology00:21:00 – Communicating with patients00:30:39 – Digital planning and AI00:36:52 – Robots and the future00:54:52 – Blackbox thinking01:02:48 – Soft tissue lessons01:05:11 – Building an Instagram following01:12:04 – Mentors in implantology01:14:44 – Why no practice of his own01:19:59 – Best lecture: Martin Kelleher01:22:36 – Fantasy dinner party About Bizhan ShokouhiBizhan Shokouhi is a specialist oral surgeon and implantologist working in private practice and at Guy's Hospital, and a tutor on the Bristol MSc in Implants. He is known for his educational Instagram content on oral surgery and soft tissue management, and previously trained in restorative dentistry and maxillofacial surgery before specialising.