Senior Research Associate, Diet and Physical Activity Interventions in Patient Populations, Nutrition Measurement Platform

Kirsten Rennie is a Senior Research Associate leading the development of physical activity measurement for the Measurement Platform and studies in secondary care for the Diet and Physical Activity Interventions in Patient Populations programme.

Her work focuses on the incorporation of remote monitoring in population-based and patient studies, including apps and wearables with the aim of improving clinical pathways and health outcomes. Kirsten is particularly interested how remote monitoring of physical activity patterning and function can be used to identify individuals who are at risk of adverse health outcomes.

Kirsten supervises Masters and PhD students and teaches on the MSt Healthcare Innovation Programme.

Kirsten has worked as an epidemiologist in both academic and industry settings, including MRC Human Nutrition Research, Oxon epidemiology, UBC, Unilever, University College London and University of Ulster. Her previous work has included the development of objective measurements of physical activity into large-scale studies such as wave form accelerometry and heart rate monitoring. This involved applying these measurements in observational studies of metabolic diseases with other measures of physical activity and dietary behaviour. Kirsten has also evaluated lifestyle interventions in weight management programmes and worked on pharmaco-epidemiology safety and effectiveness studies in large-scale patient studies.

Kirsten received a MA in Biological Anthropology (1995), MPhil in Epidemiology (1997) and PhD in physical activity epidemiology (2000) from the University of Cambridge. She is a UK registered nutritionist (Association for Nutrition, Public Health specialty). She holds an honorary research contract with Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, a Public Health Academic Contract with the Department of Health and Social Care and is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge in the Health Systems Design research group.