I am Professor of General Practice at the University of Edinburgh where I carry out applied research to translate basic and clinical research into effective and reliable clinical practice.  I was previously a Medical Research Council Health Services Research Fellow at University of Edinburgh, an National Institute for Health Research post-doctoral research fellow at University of Dundee, a 2006/7 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Healthcare Policy at University of California San Francisco where I was also a Visiting Professor in 2010, and Professor of Primary Care Medicine at University of Dundee. I have served on multiple grant panels (including Wellcome, MRC, NIHR), contribute to undergraduate and postgraduate medical teaching, and supervise and examine MSc and PhD students in Edinburgh and other universities. As well as conducting research, I serve or have served on a number of National Health Service advisory bodies, including the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) Quality and Outcomes Framework Indicators Advisory Committee (which recommended which quality indicators should be included in the UK primary care pay for performance programme) where I chaired the Thresholds, Review and Retiral Sub-committee, and the Scottish Government Polypharmacy Working Group. I was the chair of the guideline development group of the NICE Multimorbidity Clinical Guideline, and during COVID-19, I was a member of the SAGE Social Care Working Group. 

My main research interests are the quality and safety of healthcare, particularly in primary care and currently focused on multimorbidity and prescribing quality and safety including polypharmacy. I am a mixed methods researcher and collaborate with researchers from a wide range of disciplines and institutions. The methods I use include quantitative analysis of large, routine datasets; cluster randomised trials with mixed methods parallel process evaluations; and qualitative analysis of interview and observational data. My recent and current work includes morbidity clustering, development and evaluation of interventions to improve outcomes in multimorbidity and polypharmacy, improving clinical risk prediction in the face of multimorbidity and older age, and examination of the applicability of trial evidence to clinical populations. I am co-lead of the Primary Care and Multimorbidity Research Group and Director of the Advanced Care Research Centre which is an interdisciplinary collaboration involving academics from several universities and multiple disciplines (medicine, informatics, engineering, social and political sciences, geography, literature languages and culture, architecture). Other recent collaborations include the AIM-CISC (AI and Multiple Long Term Conditions) programme, and the Wellcome Trust Multimorbidity PhD Programme for Healthcare Professionals.