Kirsty is a diabetes specialist nurse and health psychologist and has recently been appointed Reader in Diabetes and Primary Care at the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing & Midwifery. Previously she has worked at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, where she was awarded a PhD in 2007 for her work on a biopsychosocial model to explain adverse outcome in people with diabetes and foot ulcers. She recently completed a NIHR post-doctoral fellowship to determine factors associated with poor uptake of structured education for people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes. She was awarded her 2nd fellowship, a NIHR/ICA Senior Clinical Lectureship, in 2016 and the aim of this is to deliver a programme of research to support people with Type 2 diabetes who are new to insulin treatment. She works clinically in primary care with the Lambeth Diabetes Intermediate Care Team.

Kirsty has been involved in the running of 3 NIHR funded studies: the South London Diabetes Cohort study, a prospective cohort for people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes; the Diabetes 6 study, a RCT of psychologically enhanced diabetes care delivered by practice nurses; and the MOVE-IT study, a RCT involving motivational interviewing therapy delivered by health trainers to reduce cardiovascular risk.