EleCtra Team

Email: [email protected]

My main research interest lies in improving the lives of individuals with a history of substance misuse problems. My research portofolios have a common thread of understanding the comorbid conditions (physical and psychological) arising as a result of chronic abuse of pharmacological agents with dependence potential especially opioids and alcohol. I am interested in utilising informatic systems, clinical outcome data, neuropsychological and neuroimaging processes amongst many other possibilities in order to identify and minimise risks present in this patient population.

I graduated as a doctor in Malta in 1987 gaining my MD in the process. I eventually decided to study psychiatry as my clinical specialisiation following a period of internal medicine jobs. I therefore joined the basic and higher psychiatric schemes in the UK (Cambridge, Edinburgh, Fife and London) in order to fulfill my requirements as a general psychiatrist and as a specialist in addiction medicine. I was awarded my MRCPsych in 1994, FRCPsych in 2007 and FRCPE in 2016. Always interested in research and teaching I pursued a clinical academic career along side my basic medical and higher psychiatric training. I joined as a lecturer and senior lecturer with St George’s Hospital Medical School in London and then with Ninewells Hospital Medical School in Dundee. I was awarded my MPhil in Psychiatry from the University of Edinburgh in 1996 and a PhD in Medicine from the University of Dundee in 2012.

I am a Executive Board Member and Chair for the training and education Committee and, recently, President Elect of the International Society of Addiction Medicine (ISAM) I am also founding member for the European Network for Training, Education and Research (ENTER)-Mental Health. Other positions include Associate Director for the Social Dimensions of Health Institute (SDHI), NHS Fife Research and Development (R&D) Director, and President for ISAMDundee2015 World Congress.

Last but certainly not least I am honoured to spend time with patients who need the best of clinical care and compassion which, I hope, makes a difference in their quality of life.

Email: [email protected]

Colin McCowan was appointed as Professor in Health Data Science from January 2019 at the University of St Andrews and is an Honorary Professor within the Institute of Health & Wellbeing at the University of Glasgow.

Colin was at the University of Glasgow between November 2012 and December 2018, most recently as Professor of Health Informatics in the Robertson Centre for Biostatistics. He has research interests in the use of existing routine data within epidemiological studies and in the support of clinical trials and other research methods. His work spans a number of clinical conditions including cancer, healthcare acquired infections, cardiovascular disease, multimorbidity and care of the elderly. He has been involved in developing services to provision routinely collected clinical data for research both at the Robertson Centre, jointly running the West of Scotland Safe Haven with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, and before that at the Health Informatics Centre in Dundee.

He led the capacity building work stream of the Farr Institute, is one of the Scottish leads for training within HDR UK and has published widely in the epidemiological and data science literature.

Email: [email protected]

Frank Sullivan has been an academic GP since 1984.  He was appointed as the Professor of Primary Care Medicine in the University of St. Andrews in 2017 where he is also the Director of Research in the School of Medicine.  His research interests lie mainly in health informatics and community based trials, covering the spectrum from record-linkage of electronic health records to decision support to the evaluation of complex interventions.  Professor Sullivan has published 234 papers on primary care research, notably in the early detection of cancer and the management of diabetes and Bell’s palsy.  He won the British Medical Association Research paper of the year in 2009 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2011 – the first family physician since 1908. His clinical practice is currently in Glenrothes.

From March 1998 until February 2014 he was the NHS Tayside professor of R&D in General Practice and Primary Care.  In the seven years before moving to Toronto he was the clinical director of the Scottish School of Primary Care.  From 2014-17 he was the inaugural Gordon F. Cheesbrough Research Chair at North York General Hospital and director of the University of Toronto’s Practice Based Research Network: UTOPIAN.  He is an honorary professor in the University of Dundee, the Department of Family & Community Medicine and Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto and an Adjunct Scientist in the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), Ontario.

Email: [email protected]

Briana MacKerron is a Senior Clinical Pharmacist in Primary Care, NHS Fife and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Medicine at the University of St Andrews.  She joined the team working on the Electra II project in November 2021, contributing her clinical skills and experience of assessing and intervening on patients and their medication in the context of multi-morbidity to improve patient safety, reduce risk of harm from medicines and improve patient outcomes.

Briana graduated from the University of Nottingham with a Master of Pharmacy.  Since qualification as a pharmacist, she has accumulated 16 years’ experience in clinical practice.  Briana is committed to better collaborations between different health settings to develop solutions that best meet the needs of the local population, ultimately workings as a single system to improve the safety of medicines and improved health outcomes.  Areas of particular interest have been renal transplant medicine in which she obtained her Independent Prescribing qualification, Directorate Lead for Medicine allowing for service review and re-design, and Advanced Pharmacist Practitioner in Biosimilars.  More recently, Briana has been a member of the NHS Fife Interface group, which aims to identify issues that occur as patients move from one healthcare sector to another.  She has also led on a Pharmacy Strategic Integration Team project with key priorities to manage and monitor patients who need compliance aids and ensure high quality care and communication at the interface.

Email: [email protected]

Dr Utkarsh Agrawal is a Research Fellow in Health Data Science and is currently working on the multimorbidity project to analyse multiple different datasets that hold information on over 10 million people. His research will focus on using data science and machine learning algorithms to answer multimorbidity related question such as which diseases and conditions are found together, how they develop as people age and which diseases (or their combination) cause the most problems for people and the health service.

Before joining the University of St Andrews, Utkarsh worked as Research Associate in School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham. Utkarsh also received his PhD from University of Nottingham and his research interests include data fusion, data science, and applied machine learning in real-world applications.