John is a PhD student and graduate researcher at the University of Exeter Medical School. He joined the Health Statistics group as a part-time PhD student in October 2014, under Professor William Henley, Dr Beverley Shields and Professor Andrew Hattersley. In January 2018 he joined Professor Hattersley’s diabetes research team full-time.

His research focuses on developing a stratified 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 advanced statistical methods to better understand the benefits and risks of each drug option, in particular which patients are likely to have the best response and/or lowest risk of side effects, and to what extent response and side-effects go hand-in-hand. He was awarded runner-up in the Diabetes UK Type 2 Diabetes Research Prize in 2017 and won the Diabetes UK Lily Clinical Science Poster Award in 2015.

John is also developing a more general methodological framework for precision medicine research using as a first discovery step ‘big’ data from routine clinical practice (the UK’s CPRD), followed by validation of findings in individual participant data from existing randomised trials available from Clinical Study Data Request and the YODA Project.

John trained at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and has 5 years’ experience as a health researcher in the financial services industry, where he specialised in longevity modelling. He has also worked a research analyst for the Cancer Council in Australia and for the NHS in the UK. Across these roles he developed his interest in applied statistical research and chronic disease epidemiology that led him to Professor Hattersley’s team at the University of Exeter.

Qualifications

MSc Control of Infectious Diseases (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)

BSc (Hons) Psychology (University of Nottingham)