Rate My Professor Manu Mathur

Professor Manu Mathur serves as Professor of Dental Public Health and Primary Care and Head of the Centre for Dental Public Health and Primary Care in the Institute of Dentistry, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at Queen Mary University of London. He also holds the position of Regional Dental Research Lead for NHS England. With nearly two decades of global experience in public health across diverse health systems, Mathur is a dental surgeon who obtained his undergraduate degree in dentistry, followed by a Masters in Public Health with Distinction from the University of Glasgow. He then pursued doctoral studies in Epidemiology and Population Health at University College London, supported by a Wellcome Trust scholarship. His professional career commenced as a research fellow at the Public Health Foundation of India, where he advanced to Head of Health Policy. Throughout his career, he has contributed to more than fifteen research projects funded by entities such as the Government of India, World Health Organization, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, and National Institutes of Health. As Co-Principal Investigator on a large-scale Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation project, he helped develop interventions to reduce tobacco consumption among youth, which influenced the banning of gutkha—a form of smokeless tobacco—in multiple Indian states. One of his first-author papers from this study serves as reference material for adolescent tobacco control interventions. Mathur led two principal investigator studies funded by the Wellcome Trust examining socio-economic determinants of oral health in slum-dwelling adolescents and the clustering of behaviors impacting oral health in vulnerable youth. He also received a substantial trial support grant from the UK Medical Research Council to assess the impact of banning sugar and sweetened beverages in Indian schools; advocacy materials from this work prompted the prohibition of aerated beverages sales in private schools in New Delhi. Additionally, as Co-PI, he contributed to developing an indicator framework for the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Mathur maintains active international research collaborations in South Asia, Africa, Australia, and the USA, often co-authoring with diverse global partners. He occupies strategic leadership roles including Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Global Oral Health, Immediate Past President of the Global Oral Health Inequalities Research Network of the International Association for Dental Research, and Chair of the International Dental Federation’s Whole Mouth Health project, which integrates oral health with general health. His research specializes in dental public health, oral health inequalities, tobacco control, and policy impacts on non-communicable diseases. With over 100 peer-reviewed publications in leading international journals, Mathur has produced national-level evidence on oral health inequalities in the Indian subcontinent. He is recognized among the top two percent of impact-making researchers worldwide in Medicine and Public Health.