Dr John Dennis

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 medicine
• Diabetes
• Clinical prediction models & counterfactual modelling
• Triangulation of evidence from observational and trial datasets
• Methods to strengthen inference from routine clinical practice databases
• Clinical translation
• Real-world evidence

Primary funding

Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellowship (2024-2029)

Grants

Development and testing of a decision aid for UK primary care to individualise treatment in type 2 diabetes. Principal investigator. Medical Research Council. Awarded Nov 2025. Amount: £2,093,483

An interoperable diabetes core dataset for discovery science, AI modelling, and precision medicine - SDE Network Driver Project. Principal investigator. NHS England. Awarded Aug 2025. Amount: £250,000

BRC Studentship: Unlocking the Power of UK Hospital Data: Leveraging Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing for High-Fidelity Clinical Research. Funder: NIHR National Institute for Health Research. Awarded Aug 2024

BRC Studentship: Using data science to develop a precision medicine approach for type 2 diabetes. NIHR National Institute for Health Research. Awarded May 2024

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.

Qualifications

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