Kirsty is a diabetes specialist nurse and health psychologist and is Reader in Diabetes and Primary Care at the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing & Midwifery. Previously she was employed by 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 has 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 was to develop and deliver a programme of research to support people with Type 2 diabetes new to insulin treatment. She is now developing this programme for people starting insulin in hospital with support from the Burdett Nursing Trust. She works clinically in primary care with the Lambeth Diabetes Intermediate Care Team.

Kirsty has been involved in the running of 4 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. She also completed an evidence synthesis for the NIHR-HTA on psychological interventions for people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes.