Kholoud has worked in HIV since 1986 and leads an epidemiology programme of work in HIV research. She gained an MSc in Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a PhD in AIDS and HIV Infection at UCL.

Her main research interests are in HIV natural history and primary HIV infection. Most of her work has been within industrialised country cohorts although she has also co-ordinated randomised controlled trial recruiting in Uganda and South Africa and within an international consortium evaluating antiretroviral therapy roll-out programmes in Africa. She is Project Leader for the UK Register of HIV Seroconverters and CASCADE, an EU-funded collaboration of HIV seroconverter cohorts. CASCADE is now part of a large Network of Excellence, EuroCoord, which she also leads.

Kholoud has collaborated widely within the UK and internationally with colleagues in European, Australian and north American research institutions. Aside from editorial work forAIDS, BMC Public Health, the Open AIDS Journal and Osong Public Health and Research Perspectives, she is a regular reviewer for several medical journals and abstracts for the International AIDS Society conferences. She has also presented at numerous national and international conferences.