John is an Associate Professor of Health Data Science and Wellcome Trust Fellow, working in the Clinical Diabetes Group at the University of Exeter Medical School. His research focuses on developing a personalised or ‘precision’ approach to drug therapy in type 2 diabetes, a condition for which there are many different drug options but little guidance to help clinicians and patients choose between them. John is applying data science and advanced statistical methods to better understand the benefits and risks of each drug option, and to develop decision aids to help health professionals choose the best drug for individual patients. He is also developing a more general methodological framework for precision medicine research combining data from electronic health records and clinical trials.

Postgraduate Research opportunities: Dr Dennis is open to enquires from students with their own funding interested in pursing an MSc by Research or PhD in diabetes or data science research.

Interests:

• Precision treatment in type 2 diabetes
• Clinical prediction models
• Triangulation of evidence from observational and trial datasets
• Methods to strengthen inference from routine clinical practice databases

Qualifications:

• PhD University of Exeter
• MSc London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
• BSc (Hons) University of Nottingham

Funding

Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellowship (2024-2029)

UKRI E3 Post-doctoral award (2019-2023)

Grants

Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellowship. Principal investigator. Funder: Wellcome Trust. Awarded May 2023. £799,814

Individual-level prediction of stroke risk following risperidone treatment in dementia: a mixed methods study. Co-investigator, with B Creese (PI) and 6 other co-applicants. Funder: NIHR Research for Patient Benefit (NIHR204390). Awarded Nov 2022. £168,554.

Individual-level cardiovascular & heart failure risk stratification to inform precision SGLT2-inhibitor treatment. Principal investigator. Funder: European Foundation for the Study of Diabetes. Awarded: September 2022. £26,115

Developing a decision support tool to enable precision treatment of type 2 diabetes. Co-investigator, with A Hattersley (PI) and 9 other co-applicants. Medical Research Council (MR/W003988/1). Awarded July 2021.

Understanding the association between diabetes & severity of COVID-19. Principal investigator, with 7 co-applicants. Funder: Diabetes UK (20/0006220). Awarded April 2020. £65,433.

Precision medicine in type 2 diabetes: developing and testing a decision support tool for primary care to optimise the selection of glucose-lowering therapy. Principal investigator, with 5 co-applicants. Funder: BHF-Turing Cardiovascular Data Science Award (SP/19/6/34809). Awarded Feb 2020. £110,000

Developing a working platform for a treatment selection algorithm for glucose lowering in Type 2 diabetes. Co-investigator, with A Hattersley (PI) and 10 other co-applicants. Funder: NIHR Development Funding Scheme (DFS). Awarded February 2018. £50,000.